
Zuckerberg reflects on 2018 in end of the year post - mindgam3
https://www.facebook.com/6/posts/10105867879993251/
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mindgam3
Full text below for those allergic to FB domains.

I feel like he would win more allies by taking a more apologetic or at least
humble stance after a brutal year, rather than ending by saying he’s “proud of
the rest of the progress” made this year. Yes, the challenges faced by
Facebook are massive, but if I were in charge over there I’m not sure if I
would be feeling pride right now at the way they were handled. Then again, if
Zuck had a more humble personality then FB wouldn’t be what it is today, for
better or worse.

“For 2018, my personal challenge has been to focus on addressing some of the
most important issues facing our community -- whether that's preventing
election interference, stopping the spread of hate speech and misinformation,
making sure people have control of their information, and ensuring our
services improve people's well-being. In each of these areas, I'm proud of the
progress we've made.

We're a very different company today than we were in 2016, or even a year ago.
We've fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm in all
our services, and we've systematically shifted a large portion of our company
to work on preventing harm. We now have more than 30,000 people working on
safety and invest billions of dollars in security yearly.

To be clear, addressing these issues is more than a one-year challenge. But in
each of the areas I mentioned, we've now established multi-year plans to
overhaul our systems and we're well into executing those roadmaps. In the past
we didn't focus as much on these issues as we needed to, but we're now much
more proactive.

That doesn't mean we'll catch every bad actor or piece of bad content, or that
people won't find more examples of past mistakes before we improved our
systems. For some of these issues, like election interference or harmful
speech, the problems can never fully be solved. They're challenges against
sophisticated adversaries and human nature where we must constantly work to
stay ahead. But overall, we've built some of the most advanced systems in the
world for identifying and resolving these issues, and we will keep improving
over the coming years.

We've made a lot of improvements and changes this year, and here are some of
the most important ones:

For preventing election interference, we've improved our systems for
identifying the fake accounts and coordinated information campaigns that
account for much of the interference -- now removing millions of fake accounts
every day. We've partnered with fact-checkers in countries around the world to
identify misinformation and reduce its distribution. We've created a new
standard for advertising transparency where anyone can now see all the ads an
advertiser is running to different audiences. We established an independent
election research commission to study threats and our systems to address them.
And we've partnered with governments and law enforcement around the world to
prepare for elections.

For stopping the spread of harmful content, we've built AI systems to
automatically identify and remove content related to terrorism, hate speech,
and more before anyone even sees it. These systems take down 99% of the
terrorist-related content we remove before anyone even reports it, for
example. We've improved News Feed to promote news from trusted sources. We're
developing systems to automatically reduce the distribution of borderline
content, including sensationalism and misinformation. We've tripled the size
of our content review team to handle more complex cases that AI can't judge.
We've built an appeals system for when we get decisions wrong. We're working
to establish an independent body that people can appeal decisions to and that
will help decide our policies. We've begun issuing transparency reports on our
effectiveness in removing harmful content. And we've also started working with
governments, like in France, to establish effective content regulations for
internet platforms.

For making sure people have control of their information, we changed our
developer platform to reduce the amount of information apps can access --
following the major changes we already made back in 2014 to dramatically
reduce access that would prevent issues like what we saw with Cambridge
Analytica from happening today. We rolled out new controls for GDPR around the
whole world and asked everyone to check their privacy settings. We reduced
some of the third-party information we use in our ads systems. We started
building a Clear History tool that will give people more transparency into
their browsing history and let people clear it from our systems. And we've
continued developing encrypted and ephemeral messaging and sharing services
that we believe will be the foundation for how people communicate going
forward.

For making sure our services improve people's well-being, we conducted
research that found that when people use the internet to interact with others,
that's associated with all the positive aspects of well-being you'd expect,
including greater happiness, health, feeling more connected, and so on. But
when you just use the internet to consume content passively, that's not
associated with those same positive effects. Based on this research, we've
changed our services to encourage meaningful social interactions rather than
passive consumption. One change we made reduced the amount of viral videos
people watched by 50 million hours a day. In total, these changes
intentionally reduced engagement and revenue in the near term, although we
believe they'll help us build a stronger community and business over the long
term.

If you're interested in reading more about these changes, I've written
extensively about our work on elections here
([https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/preparing-
for...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/preparing-for-
elections/10156300047606634/)) and content governance and enforcement here
([https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-
zuckerberg/a-blueprint-f...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-
zuckerberg/a-blueprint-for-content-governance-and-
enforcement/10156443129621634/)). You can also read about our research on
well-being here ([https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/hard-questions-is-
spend...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/hard-questions-is-spending-
time-on-social-media-bad-for-us/)).

I've learned a lot from focusing on these issues and we still have a lot of
work ahead. I'm proud of the progress we've made in 2018 and grateful to
everyone who has helped us get here -- the teams inside Facebook, our partners
and the independent researchers and everyone who has given us so much
feedback. I'm committed to continuing to make progress on these important
issues as we enter the new year.

I'm also proud of the rest of the progress we've made this year. More than 2
billion people now use one of our services every single day to stay connected
with the people who matter most in their lives. Hundreds of millions of people
are part of communities they tell us make up their most important social
support. People have come together using these tools to raise more than $1
billion for causes and to find more than 1 million new jobs. More than 90
million small businesses use our tools, and more than half say they've hired
more people because of them. Building community and bringing people together
leads to a lot of good, and I'm committed to continuing our progress in these
areas as well.

Here's to a great new year to come.“

