These have been trying and soul-searching times for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. While his global advertising business is on fire, Facebook has been accused of spreading fake news, which some critics say has exacerbated political division and perhaps played a role in the election of President Donald Trump.

Zuckerberg has clearly been wrestling with these issues. The company has taken notable steps to address the spread of fake news, creating a new program dedicated to the problem after earlier downplaying it as an issue. And the executive has already kicked off his 2017 goal to visit and meet people in all 50 states, which fueled some speculation he might be preparing for office.

While there is no indication that Zuckerberg is planning a move on to electoral politics (he said recently he isn't planning to run), he shared a nearly 6,000-word manifesto on Thursday that reads like something a statesman, not a businessman, would write.

In an open letter shared to his Facebook page, Zuckerberg highlighted Facebook's plan to shift from connecting friends and family, which it has emphasized for the past decade, to focusing on building the social infrastructure for a global community, using the world's largest social network as a foundation.

"For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families," Zuckerberg said in his letter. "With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community -- for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all."

Zuckerberg's full letter can be read here:</s>On our journey to connect the world, we often discuss products we’re building and updates on our business. Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?



Mark Zuckerberg opens his missive with a grammatical ambiguity: who are “we�?? Is this a letter to Facebook, or to the world? It can be read both ways. But regardless of the intended audience, there’s a subtext to the opening paragraph which informs the whole 5,700-word letter: for an increasing number of people, the answer to Zuckerberg’s question is “no�?. Zuckerberg wants for more than Facebook to be an insanely profitable mega-corporation. He wants the company to be seen as a force for good in the world, and right now, he’s concerned that it isn’t.

History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers -- from tribes to cities to nations.

This is the Facebook theory of history, and it’s a long way from “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles�?. But it sets the scale of Zuckerberg’s thinking: he genuinely views Facebook as a new paradigm for the organisation of human civilisation.

I am reminded of my favorite saying about technology: “We always overestimate what we can do in two years, and we underestimate what we can do in ten years.�?

Strangely, Zuckerberg declined to cite the author of this “saying�?: Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who wrote those words in his 1996 book, the Road Ahead. Perhaps he wants to avoid comparisons between the two men, who are increasingly alike, just 20 years apart.

In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us … Our job at Facebook is to help people make the greatest positive impact while mitigating areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness and isolation.

This is the new mission statement for Facebook. It’s more nuanced than “connect the world�?, and shows much greater self-awareness than “move fast and break things�?. But is it too self-apologetic? It’s hard to imagine anyone at Facebook being motivated by such a caveated principle.

Building a global community that works for everyone starts with the millions of smaller communities and intimate social structures we turn to for our personal, emotional and spiritual needs.

Zuckerberg identifies “five important questions�? for Facebook to answer; the first is how to build “supportive communities�?.

We recently found that more than 100 million people on Facebook are members of what we call “very meaningful�? groups. These are groups that upon joining, quickly become the most important part of our social network experience and an important part of our physical support structure … Going forward, we will measure Facebook’s progress with groups based on meaningful groups, not groups overall.

The first of the odd switches in tone, as Zuckerberg shifts from huge statements for how to change Facebook’s impact on the world to an announcement of a different internal metric. Those “very meaningful�? groups certainly sound like a smart thing for Facebook to focus on, but it’s not immediately clear how much Facebook can influence their creation: how many of these groups are created by Facebook, rather than just being groups which would have existed since time immemorial, now being organised on Facebook?

We plan to build more tools to empower community leaders to run and grow their groups the way they’d like, similar to what we’ve done with Pages … We plan to expand groups to support sub-communities … We can design these experiences not for passive consumption but for strengthening social connections.

The odd shift in focus continues. A significant chunk of the letter is spent discussing fairly niche product refreshes. It might be important for Facebook’s long-term strategy, but it feels disconnected from the earlier lofty rhetoric.

To help during a crisis, we’ve built infrastructure like Safety Check so we can all let our friends know we’re safe and check on friends who might be affected by an attack or natural disaster. Safety Check has been activated almost 500 times in two years and has already notified people that their families and friends are safe more than a billion times

The letter shifts to something in the vein of a pre-emptive apology, basically here to remind you that Facebook is good. But Safety Check hasn’t been the PR slam-dunk it might seem it was. Initially, the product opened Facebook up to accusations of racism, since it had to be manually activated by Facebook staff, leading to a perception that attacks on developed nations received priority treatment. Then, when it was automated, it helped spread false reports of an attack in Thailand that never actually happened.

Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community. There are billions of posts, comments and messages across our services each day, and since it’s impossible to review all of them, we review content once it is reported to us. There have been terribly tragic events -- like suicides, some live streamed -- that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner. There are cases of bullying and harassment every day, that our team must be alerted to before we can help out. These stories show we must find a way to do more. Artificial intelligence can help provide a better approach. We are researching systems that can look at photos and videos to flag content our team should review. This is still very early in development, but we have started to have it look at some content, and it already generates about one-third of all reports to the team that reviews content for our community. It will take many years to fully develop these systems. Right now, we’re starting to explore ways to use AI to tell the difference between news stories about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda.

Here we have the first mention of artificial intelligence as the future solution for a myriad of problems. It is a recurring theme throughout the letter: a difficult problem gets punted to the AI team to be solved at some point that even Zuckerberg acknowledges may be far off. Some of these problems will be successfully tackled by improved AI, but others won’t. The propaganda problem, for instance, seems extraordinarily hard. Does the prospect of future solutions mean Facebook can get away with not acting in the meantime?

The two most discussed concerns this past year were about diversity of viewpoints we see (filter bubbles) and accuracy of information (fake news). I worry about these and we have studied them extensively, but I also worry there are even more powerful effects we must mitigate around sensationalism and polarization leading to a loss of common understanding.

Almost exactly in the middle of the letter, surrounded by explanations of all the good things Facebook does, we get on to the section which is why this letter exists in the first place. Facebook’s effect on the generation of fake news and filter bubbles has sparked consternation worldwide, with the site being directly blamed for “radicalisation�? of the far right in multiple nations. It has concerned Facebook executives at the highest levels, including Zuckerberg. But the question is, do they accept the accusations? And what are they going to do about them?

Social media already provides more diverse viewpoints than traditional media ever has. Even if most of our friends are like us, we all know people with different interests, beliefs and backgrounds who expose us to different perspectives. Compared with getting our news from the same two or three TV networks or reading the same newspapers with their consistent editorial views, our networks on Facebook show us more diverse content.

This is a bold claim, and one many media experts would dispute. Facebook is good at giving multiple sources, but is it really good at giving “different perspectives�?? Experiments designed to reflect political polarisation suggest maybe not: the newsfeed algorithm acts to concentrate viewpoints like little before. Even if you do have friends and family members with different interests and backgrounds, Facebook will hide those differences from you in order to give you the News Feed you’re comfortable with.

But our goal must be to help people see a more complete picture, not just alternate perspectives. We must be careful how we do this. Research shows that some of the most obvious ideas, like showing people an article from the opposite perspective, actually deepen polarization by framing other perspectives as foreign. A more effective approach is to show a range of perspectives, let people see where their views are on a spectrum and come to a conclusion on what they think is right. Over time, our community will identify which sources provide a complete range of perspectives so that content will naturally surface more.

Even if Facebook doesn’t actually show different perspectives, Zuckerberg is arguing, that may not be a problem. Maybe those different perspectives could lead to more polarisation, not less? It feels a bit like the classic lawyer’s argument: the discourse isn’t broken, and if it is, my client didn’t do it, and if they did, it was a good thing anyway.

Accuracy of information is very important. We know there is misinformation and even outright hoax content on Facebook, and we take this very seriously … Our approach will focus less on banning misinformation, and more on surfacing additional perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item’s accuracy.

The other side of the polarisation problem: “fake news�?. Facebook is in a tricky position, and Zuckerberg knows it The firm can’t deny that it’s a problem that Macedonian teens can make up stories for an audience of millions, mediated almost exclusively by Facebook. But the term “fake news�? is so contested that any solution will inevitably fall far short of satisfying everyone.

We noticed some people share stories based on sensational headlines without ever reading the story. In general, if you become less likely to share a story after reading it, that’s a good sign the headline was sensational.

Facebook’s News Feed tweaks can seem small, but their changes reverberate throughout the media world with enormous effects, bankrupting some outlets while heaping windfalls on others. This particular tweak seems smart.

A strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community. Giving people a voice is not enough without having people dedicated to uncovering new information and analyzing it. There is more we must do to support the news industry to make sure this vital social function is sustainable -- from growing local news, to developing formats best suited to mobile devices, to improving the range of business models news organizations rely on.

This feels like a nice sleight-of-hand. Unlike much of the rest of the letter, which follows pattern of acknowledging a problem before presenting a (potential) solution, this is just the problem: Zuckerberg doesn’t really have any ideas about how to solve it.

The vast majority of conversations on Facebook are social, not ideological. They’re friends sharing jokes and families staying in touch across cities. They’re people finding groups, whether they’re new parents raising kids or newly diagnosed patients suffering from a disease together. Sometimes it’s for joy, coming together around religion or sports. And sometimes it’s for survival, like refugees communicating to find shelter.

In other words, worrying about the corrosive effect of Facebook on political discourse is for the metropolitan liberal elite. Most of what Facebook is used for doesn’t as adverse effects, so just cheer up and click “like�? on a baby photo.

Our society will reflect our collective values only if we engage in the civic process and participate in self-governance. There are two distinct types of social infrastructure that must be built: The first encourages engagement in existing political processes: voting, engaging with issues and representatives, speaking out, and sometimes organizing. Only through dramatically greater engagement can we ensure these political processes reflect our values. The second is establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in collective decision-making. Our world is more connected than ever, and we face global problems that span national boundaries. As the largest global community, Facebook can explore examples of how community governance might work at scale.

This is how Facebook wants to be thought of when it comes to politics Rather than a passive funnel through which distorted news arrives at people’s screens, it wants to be an active location for political engagement.

First, our community is evolving from its origin connecting us with family and friends to now becoming a source of news and public discourse as well … Second, our community spans many countries and cultures, and the norms are different in each region … Third, even within a given culture, we have different opinions on what we want to see and what is objectionable … Fourth, we’re operating at such a large scale that even a small percent of errors causes a large number of bad experiences.

Zuckerberg has identified the problems faced by Facebook’s censorship regime. For some, there’s an easy solution, such as tweaking the community standards to allow more boundary-pushing imagery with strong news value. For others, there’s a more hand-wavy solution: AI again. At some point in the future.

The approach is to combine creating a large-scale democratic process to determine standards with AI to help enforce them … With a broader range of controls, content will only be taken down if it is more objectionable than the most permissive options allow … It’s worth noting that major advances in AI are required to understand text, photos and videos to judge whether they contain hate speech, graphic violence, sexually explicit content, and more. At our current pace of research, we hope to begin handling some of these cases in 2017, but others will not be possible for many years.

Again, Zuckerberg acknowledges these are really hard technological problems and any easy AI-based solutions are a long way off. Zuckerberg seems to be hoping concerned users will accept “we’re trying�? as an acceptable position for Facebook to take.

I am reminded of President Lincoln’s remarks during the American Civil War: “We can succeed only by concert. It is not ‘can any of us imagine better?’ but, ‘can we all do better?’ The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, act anew.�?

Zuckerberg’s final section ends with a quote from Abraham Lincoln, which has renewed speculation that his new interest in addressing political problems is a lead-in to a presidential campaign in 2024. But the letter as a whole suggests a more nuanced reading: While the Facebook chief executive is undoubtedly considering an entry into political life, he is also recognising that running the world’s largest social network is effectively a political career in itself. Maybe in Zuckerberg’s vision of history, after tribes and cities and nations, comes Facebook. There, he is already the leader.</s>The use of live streaming platforms being used to broadcast deeply troubling videos as the unfold live is a very modern problem thrown up by the advance of technology.

Platforms such as YouTube, Periscope and Facebook live are essential tools for relaying unfolding news events in real-time.

However, they are also used by some people at times of extreme vulnerability to show them taking their own lives, or by bullies or criminals to broadcast their abuse to an audience.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says he recognises the problem and is taking steps to try and prevent suicides and similar disturbing content from being viewed.

To do that, he says, Facebook needs to develop artificial intelligence tools that can analyse and identify content in real-time to help the platform's moderators be proactive instead of reactive.

"Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community," he writes.

"There are billions of posts, comments and messages across our services each day, and since it's impossible to review all of them, we review content once it is reported to us.

"There have been terribly tragic events -- like suicides, some live streamed -- that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner.

"There are cases of bullying and harassment every day, that our team must be alerted to before we can help out. These stories show we must find a way to do more.

"Artificial intelligence can help provide a better approach. We are researching systems that can look at photos and videos to flag content our team should review.

Facebook doesn't want to stop fake news, just label it more clearly

"This is still very early in development, but we have started to have it look at some content, and it already generates about one-third of all reports to the team that reviews content for our community."

Zuckerberg's comments are made in a 6,000-word essay he posted top his Facebook profile page outlining the social network's future goals.

Zuckerberg posted the mission statement today, addressing his desire to focus on using the platform to turn online communities in to real physical groups.

Among the other subjects tackled in the essay are the desire to build tool that allow people to form meaningful communities, and the aim of getting the balance right between what to remove from the site and what to leave up - including 'fake news'.

After the hugely divisive election campaign that resulted in Donald Trump being elected to the White House - and his obsession with perceived partisan media reports - the best way to tackle 'misinformation' online has become a hot topic.

However, Zuckerberg has declared that he does not want to root out 'fake news' and delete it from the platform, but instead wants content to be rated and marked by Facebook's team.

That way, he argues, people can enjoy a multiplicity of media and form a balanced view of their own, rather than allowing Faceook to become an 'echo chamber' of friends holding the same views as the user.

"Our goal must be to help people see a more complete picture, not just alternate perspectives," he writes.

"Accuracy of information is very important. We know there is misinformation and even outright hoax content on Facebook, and we take this very seriously.

"We've made progress fighting hoaxes the way we fight spam, but we have more work to do. We are proceeding carefully because there is not always a clear line between hoaxes, satire and opinion.

"In a free society, it's important that people have the power to share their opinion, even if others think they're wrong.

"Our approach will focus less on banning misinformation, and more on surfacing additional perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item's accuracy."

Samaritans (116 123) operates a 24-hour service available every day of the year. If you prefer to write down how you’re feeling, or if you’re worried about being overheard on the phone, you can email Samaritans at jo@samaritans.org .</s>Over the last year, Facebook has been confronted with an unprecedented and unforgiving wave of criticism. While there are many specific complaints that have been made about the company — its relationship with “fake news” (of both the genuinely fake and the merely misleading varieties), its mishandled “Trending” topics, and its role in perpetuating informational-filter bubbles, to name the most prominent — the criticism of the last several months hinges largely on this: Facebook has become one of the two most powerful networks on the planet for the distribution of news and information. And while founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has expressed skepticism over Facebook’s role in last year’s presidential election, he’s clearly taken the criticism seriously. He just wrote a 5,800-word Facebook post, updating the company’s mission and pointing toward its future. It sounds, frankly, like Zuck would like a do-over.

Zuckerberg’s globalist pledge went live yesterday afternoon, along with a coordinated media blitz: The generally press-shy CEO gave four interviews to prominent technology-business publications, emphasizing the document’s embrace of an interconnected world. (The best is with Recode’s Kara Swisher: “Mark Zuckerberg … has become of late very, how shall we put it, woke.”) To the casual observers who’ve been predicting a Zuckerberg run for office, the whole event felt like further confirmation. But after reading the document, my sense is that Mark Zuckerberg isn’t setting himself up for a political career, but is finally dragging himself across the finish line of self-realization. Zuckerberg — always, as Swisher puts it, “the most earnest of leaders in Silicon Valley” — has spent some time thinking very hard about his creation, and he wants you to know that he understands Facebook’s immense power, and that he will use it to create a better future. Put another way: This isn’t a campaign speech; it’s an inauguration speech.

Zuckerberg wants to position Facebook, a publicly traded nongovernment company, as the global communication layer under which everything else rests. It’s a not-very-subtle way of making the case to give Facebook an even larger amount of influence than it already wields, but, you know, for the greater good.

But realization is only the first step. Zuckerberg definitely seems to believe what he’s saying about building a global community, but there’s little concrete in here about how it would be accomplished — or, more importantly, how it will affect Facebook’s business model and bottom line, which is still the driving force behind … everything they do. Facebook attempted a disastrous rollout of its “Free Basics” internet-service program in India a couple of years ago, and was quickly met with backlash over monopolistic practices. Now, that same basic pitch is being applied to the entire world. Among the specific initiatives Zuck proposes is using artificial intelligence to identify and hide misleading or objectionable content, more public-service features like Safety Check, and, uh, making Groups into a more useful product.

The manifesto contains one important admission from Zuckerberg (Facebook is vastly influential), but lacks a corresponding truth (that power is what makes people skeptical of Facebook). In fact, what Zuckerberg has done is provide an inadvertent argument for the decentralization of the internet — small groups and communities with the ability to access a larger global network when necessary. The idea of a global communication network is very popular already: It’s called the internet. The manifesto reads like Mark Zuckerberg has never encountered an email client or a LISTSERV. That network grew and thrived thanks to the proliferation of open standards, like email and web protocols. Facebook, conversely, is a technological black box whose breakthroughs exist to enrich itself, first and foremost. If Mark Zuckerberg truly cares about global communication, he might want to think about putting more of the company’s tremendous resources toward developing the types of open standards that can exist outside of Facebook.

It is fun that Zuckerberg has finally realized how much power Facebook truly has to shape people’s understanding of current events, while he continues to keep initial investor, Trump adviser, and Gawker lawsuit funder Peter Thiel on the board. Zuckerberg’s manifesto is a nice idea (and a so-so piece of writing). But Facebook has made many claims to care about its users in the past, and then acted to the contrary or not acted at all.</s>NEW YORK – Mark Zuckerberg‘s long-term vision for Facebook, laid out in a sweeping manifesto , sometimes sounds more like a utopian social guide than a business plan. Are we, he asks, “building the world we all want?”

While most people now use Facebook to connect with friends and family, Zuckerberg hopes that the social network can encourage more civic engagement, an informed public and community support in the years to come. Facebook now has nearly 2 billion members, which makes it larger than any nation in the world.

His 5,800-word essay positions Facebook in direct opposition to a rising tide of isolationism and fear of outsiders, both in the U.S. and abroad. In a phone interview with The Associated Press, Zuckerberg stressed that he wasn’t motivated by the U.S. election or any other particular event. Rather, he said, it’s the growing sentiment in many parts of the world that “connecting the world” – the founding idea behind Facebook – is no longer a good thing.



“Across the world there are people left behind by globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection,” Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, wrote on Thursday. “In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.”

Zuckerberg, 32, told the AP that he still strongly believes that more connectedness is the right direction for the world. But, he adds, it’s “not enough if it’s good for some people but it’s doesn’t work for other people. We really have to bring everyone along.”

It’s hardly a surprise that Zuckerberg wants to find ways to bring more people together, especially on Facebook. After all, getting more people to come together on the social network more frequently would give Facebook more opportunities to sell the ads that generate most of its revenue, which totalled $27 billion last year. And bringing in more money probably would boost Facebook’s stock price to make Zuckerberg – already worth an estimated $56 billion – even richer.

READ MORE: Facebook’s new Community Help feature will help connect people during disasters

And while the idea of unifying the world is laudable, some critics – backed various studies – contend Facebook makes some people feel lonelier and more isolated as they scroll through the mostly ebullient posts and photos shared on the social network. Facebook’s famous “like” button also makes it easy to engage in a form of “one-click” communication that replaces meaningful dialogue.

Facebook also has been lambasted as polarizing force by circulating posts espousing similar viewpoints and interests among like-minded people, creating an “echo chamber” that can harden opinions and widen political and cultural chasms.

Today, most of Facebook’s 1.86 billion members – about 85 per cent – live outside of the U.S. and Canada. The Menlo Park, California-based company has offices everywhere from Amsterdam to Jakarta, Indonesia, to Tel Aviv, Israel. (It is banned in China, the world’s most populous country, though some people get around the ban.) Naturally, Zuckerberg takes a global view of Facebook and sees potential that goes beyond borders, cities and nations.

And that could allow the social network to step up as more traditional cultural ties fray. People already use Facebook to connect with strangers who have the same rare disease, to post political diatribes, to share news links (and sometimes fake news links ). Facebook has also pushed its users to register to vote, to donate to causes, to mark themselves safe after natural disasters, and to “go live .” For many, it’s become a utility. Some 1.23 billion people use it daily.

“For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families. With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community – for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all,” he wrote.

WATCH: Facebook looking to crack down on so-called ‘fake news’

Zuckerberg has gotten Facebook to this position of global dominance – one that Myspace and Twitter, for instance, never even approached – partly thanks to his audacious, long-term view of the company and its place in the world.

Last fall, Zuckerberg and his wife, the doctor Priscilla Chan, unveiled the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative , a long-term effort aimed at eradicating all disease by the end of this century. Then, as now, Zuckerberg preferred to look far down the road to the potential of scientific and technological innovations that have not been perfected, or even invented yet. This includes artificial intelligence.

READ MORE: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg drops bid to buy out Native Hawaiians’ land

“Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community,” he wrote.

Speaking to the AP, Zuckerberg said he understands that we might not “solve all the issues that we want” in the short term.

“One of my favourite quotes is this Bill Gates quote, that ‘people overestimate what they can get done in two years and underestimate what they can get done in 10 years.’ And that’s an important mindset that I hope more people take today,” he said.</s>Mark Zuckerberg opens his missive with a grammatical ambiguity: who are “we”? Is this a letter to Facebook, or to the world? It can be read both ways. But regardless of the intended audience, there’s a subtext to the opening paragraph which informs the whole 5,700-word letter: for an increasing number of people, the answer to Zuckerberg’s question is “no”. Zuckerberg wants for more than Facebook to be an insanely profitable mega-corporation. He wants the company to be seen as a force for good in the world, and right now, he’s concerned that it isn’t.

This is the Facebook theory of history, and it’s a long way from “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. But it sets the scale of Zuckerberg’s thinking: he genuinely views Facebook as a new paradigm for the organisation of human civilisation.

Strangely, Zuckerberg declined to cite the author of this “saying”: Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who wrote those words in his 1996 book, the Road Ahead. Perhaps he wants to avoid comparisons between the two men, who are increasingly alike, just 20 years apart.

This is the new mission statement for Facebook. It’s more nuanced than “connect the world”, and shows much greater self-awareness than “move fast and break things”. But is it too self-apologetic? It’s hard to imagine anyone at Facebook being motivated by such a caveated principle.

Zuckerberg identifies “five important questions” for Facebook to answer; the first is how to build “supportive communities”.

The first of the odd switches in tone, as Zuckerberg shifts from huge statements for how to change Facebook’s impact on the world to an announcement of a different internal metric. Those “very meaningful” groups certainly sound like a smart thing for Facebook to focus on, but it’s not immediately clear how much Facebook can influence their creation: how many of these groups are created by Facebook, rather than just being groups which would have existed since time immemorial, now being organised on Facebook?

The odd shift in focus continues. A significant chunk of the letter is spent discussing fairly niche product refreshes. It might be important for Facebook’s long-term strategy, but it feels disconnected from the earlier lofty rhetoric.

The letter shifts to something in the vein of a pre-emptive apology, basically here to remind you that Facebook is good. But Safety Check hasn’t been the PR slam-dunk it might seem it was. Initially, the product opened Facebook up to accusations of racism, since it had to be manually activated by Facebook staff, leading to a perception that attacks on developed nations received priority treatment. Then, when it was automated, it helped spread false reports of an attack in Thailand that never actually happened.

Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community. There are billions of posts, comments and messages across our services each day, and since it’s impossible to review all of them, we review content once it is reported to us. There have been terribly tragic events -- like suicides, some live streamed -- that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner. There are cases of bullying and harassment every day, that our team must be alerted to before we can help out. These stories show we must find a way to do more. Artificial intelligence can help provide a better approach. We are researching systems that can look at photos and videos to flag content our team should review. This is still very early in development, but we have started to have it look at some content, and it already generates about one-third of all reports to the team that reviews content for our community. It will take many years to fully develop these systems. Right now, we’re starting to explore ways to use AI to tell the difference between news stories about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda.

Here we have the first mention of artificial intelligence as the future solution for a myriad of problems. It is a recurring theme throughout the letter: a difficult problem gets punted to the AI team to be solved at some point that even Zuckerberg acknowledges may be far off. Some of these problems will be successfully tackled by improved AI, but others won’t. The propaganda problem, for instance, seems extraordinarily hard. Does the prospect of future solutions mean Facebook can get away with not acting in the meantime?

Almost exactly in the middle of the letter, surrounded by explanations of all the good things Facebook does, we get on to the section which is why this letter exists in the first place. Facebook’s effect on the generation of fake news and filter bubbles has sparked consternation worldwide, with the site being directly blamed for “radicalisation” of the far right in multiple nations. It has concerned Facebook executives at the highest levels, including Zuckerberg. But the question is, do they accept the accusations? And what are they going to do about them?

This is a bold claim, and one many media experts would dispute. Facebook is good at giving multiple sources, but is it really good at giving “different perspectives”? Experiments designed to reflect political polarisation suggest maybe not: the newsfeed algorithm acts to concentrate viewpoints like little before. Even if you do have friends and family members with different interests and backgrounds, Facebook will hide those differences from you in order to give you the News Feed you’re comfortable with.

Even if Facebook doesn’t actually show different perspectives, Zuckerberg is arguing, that may not be a problem. Maybe those different perspectives could lead to more polarisation, not less? It feels a bit like the classic lawyer’s argument: the discourse isn’t broken, and if it is, my client didn’t do it, and if they did, it was a good thing anyway.

The other side of the polarisation problem: “fake news”. Facebook is in a tricky position, and Zuckerberg knows it The firm can’t deny that it’s a problem that Macedonian teens can make up stories for an audience of millions, mediated almost exclusively by Facebook. But the term “fake news” is so contested that any solution will inevitably fall far short of satisfying everyone.

Facebook’s News Feed tweaks can seem small, but their changes reverberate throughout the media world with enormous effects, bankrupting some outlets while heaping windfalls on others. This particular tweak seems smart.

This feels like a nice sleight-of-hand. Unlike much of the rest of the letter, which follows pattern of acknowledging a problem before presenting a (potential) solution, this is just the problem: Zuckerberg doesn’t really have any ideas about how to solve it.

In other words, worrying about the corrosive effect of Facebook on political discourse is for the metropolitan liberal elite. Most of what Facebook is used for doesn’t as adverse effects, so just cheer up and click “like” on a baby photo.

This is how Facebook wants to be thought of when it comes to politics Rather than a passive funnel through which distorted news arrives at people’s screens, it wants to be an active location for political engagement.

Zuckerberg has identified the problems faced by Facebook’s censorship regime. For some, there’s an easy solution, such as tweaking the community standards to allow more boundary-pushing imagery with strong news value. For others, there’s a more hand-wavy solution: AI again. At some point in the future.

Again, Zuckerberg acknowledges these are really hard technological problems and any easy AI-based solutions are a long way off. Zuckerberg seems to be hoping concerned users will accept “we’re trying” as an acceptable position for Facebook to take.

Zuckerberg’s final section ends with a quote from Abraham Lincoln, which has renewed speculation that his new interest in addressing political problems is a lead-in to a presidential campaign in 2024. But the letter as a whole suggests a more nuanced reading: While the Facebook chief executive is undoubtedly considering an entry into political life, he is also recognising that running the world’s largest social network is effectively a political career in itself. Maybe in Zuckerberg’s vision of history, after tribes and cities and nations, comes Facebook. There, he is already the leader.</s>’s purpose is now bigger than simply connecting individuals to each other, according to Mark Zuckerberg.

The CEO of the world’s largest social network, with more than 1.8 billion monthly users, posted a 5,734-word mission statement Thursday in which he said the next focus for the company will be to develop the “social infrastructure” for a connected, global community.

According to Zuckerberg’s treatise, Facebook can — and should — help address such pressing issues as ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics, as well as combating the spread of fake news and hate speech.

“For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families,” he wrote. “In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.”

The 32-year-old billionaire’s post is the first overarching update on Facebook’s mission since 2012, at the time of the company’s initial public offering. In that statement five years ago, he focused on interpersonal relations but conveyed the similarly lofty goal of making “the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company.”

But what does Facebook’s bigger vision mean on a practical level? According to Zuckerberg, it means that Facebook will focus on tools “to amplify the good effects and mitigate the bad.”

Facebook will concentrate on building products in five areas: The company wants to help communities become more supportive, safe, informed, civically engaged and inclusive, Zuckerberg wrote.

Technologies like artificial intelligence will need more investment in order to be useful to Facebook’s communities, he wrote. “It’s worth noting that major advances in AI are required to understand text, photos and videos to judge whether they contain hate speech, graphic violence, sexually explicit content, and more,” Zuckerberg said, adding that the company hopes to “begin handling some of these cases in 2017, but others will not be possible for many years.”</s>Facebook plans to use artificial intelligence to identify posts that might promote or glorify terrorism, a move that follows growing concern about terrorists' efforts to recruit on social networks.

In a 5,700-word missive posted Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the technology "will take many years to fully develop" because it requires software sophisticated enough to distinguish between a news story about a terrorist attack and efforts to recruit on behalf of a terrorist organization.

Currently, Facebook largely relies on users to flag questionable content.

Zuckerberg also expounded on the company's efforts to build a global community through Facebook, and wrote that its success will depend on "whether we're building a community that helps keep us safe - that prevents harm, helps during crises, and rebuilds afterwards."

Critics have taken aim at Facebook, along with other social networks, for what they see as insufficient efforts to police the content transmitted across its network. From propaganda shared by suspected terrorists to suicides streamed live to friends and family, social networks have inadvertently become a breeding ground for the unsavory sides of the Internet.

Terrorism has been a particularly sensitive topic. A Department of Justice official told CNBC last October that most cases of domestic terrorism begin with communication on social media and that terrorism groups are targeting their messages at young people.

"Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community," Zuckerberg wrote.

Facebook has attempted to tamp down potential terrorist propaganda for more than a year. A Wall Street Journal report from February 2016 said pressure from the government prompted the company to remove profiles of those suspected of supporting terrorism and scrutinize their friends' posts more carefully.

In December, CNN reported that Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft would create a shared database to track and delete "violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos."

Facebook's attempts to filter, or not filter, content on its network has led to controversy before. The company came under fire for failing to stop fake news stories from circulating during the recent presidential campaign, but also alarmed conservatives who expressed concern their views were being suppressed. Zuckerberg acknowledged the fake news problem in his letter Thursday, though he did not say whether artificial intelligence might help solve that challenge as well.

"There are billions of posts, comments and messages across our services each day, and since it's impossible to review all of them, we review content once it is reported to us. There have been terribly tragic events - like suicides, some live streamed - that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner. There are cases of bullying and harassment every day, that our team must be alerted to before we can help out. These stories show we must find a way to do more."</s>When I ask Mark Zuckerberg if the presidential election changed the way he sees Facebook—if he made poor assumptions, if Facebook functioned in ways he didn’t intend—he pauses.

I’ve interviewed Zuckerberg before, and he tends to pause like this, gathering his thoughts in complete silence, sometimes turning to face the empty space across the room. But this dead air lasts particularly long. Five seconds. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. “I don’t know,” he finally says. “It’s a very interesting question.” Pause.

“If you continue giving people voice and work to create a diversity of ideas and common understanding and strengthen the social fabric,” he says, not directly answering the question, “then over the long term we will go in the right direction regardless if you disagree on short-term things.”

In other words, as Facebook monopolizes the world’s attention and helps Americans construct parallel factual universes, undermining old-media business models and altering the dynamics of electoral politics, Zuckerberg isn’t budging from the belief that Facebook is on the right path. As he has repeatedly said since the election, he believes his platform brings people together—despite the sea of evidence that in its stated mission to “connect the world” Facebook may be helping to tear it apart.

But in that long, painful pause, I get the sense that Zuckerberg is wrestling with Facebook’s flaws. His unease also lies just below the surface of a 5,000-word treatise the company released this afternoon in which Zuckerberg expounds on his vision for Facebook’s future. In the letter, he doesn’t really concede the point that Facebook may be responsible for the warping of civil discourse. Instead, he reframes. For Zuckerberg, this is a decisive moment in his company’s short history, the first major restatement of Facebook’s mission since he published his manifesto, “The Hacker Way,” before the company went public in 2012. Facebook as his new letter re-imagines it should function as a global “social infrastructure,” the technological underpinning of a world more tightly connected in real life.

“When I started Facebook, the mission of connecting people wasn’t a controversial thing. The default assumption was that the world was coming closer together,” he tells me. “But for the last couple of years, it’s really been much more of a question.” Now, he wants the world to know he still believes that Facebook is the answer. In his letter, he vows to build a Facebook that forges new connections capable of strengthening ties in the real world. But Zuckerberg still doesn’t seem to know how exactly Facebook will take a platform that has driven so many people apart and use it to pull off a great global coming together.

After spending a decade portraying Facebook as a service for connecting friends and family, Zuckerberg’s grand vision is now to build technology that creates far bigger and more complex communities. “Humanity has always pushed to come together in greater numbers to accomplish better things and improve our lives individually in ways we couldn’t in smaller groups,” he tells me. If your News Feed now feels like a tiny town, Zuckerberg seems to want to build cities. Or at least churches.

In our conversation, he says his model for an online community might look something like Saddleback, the evangelical Southern California megachurch led by pastor Rick Warren. It’s a surprising example from a man who seems steeped in the liberal pluralism of Silicon Valley. But the key for Zuckerberg is that Warren built a community in which tens of thousands of people gather under a capable leader’s guidance, but also divide themselves into smaller groups by interest, affinity, and aspirations.

In Zuckerberg’s new vision for Facebook, leaders in the mold of Warren will have tools to guide and shape the more complex communities they’re trying to create. At the same time, the smaller groups within those communities will provide places to connect in more intimate ways, while also feeding the larger whole. “Just like becoming friends with people on Facebook can strengthen real-world relationships, there is no reason to believe that building communities on Facebook and the internet can’t also strengthen real-world communities,” he says.

Except that as the 2016 presidential election showed, Facebook is also incredibly effective at weakening the norms that hold real-world communities together. Zuckerberg likes to speak in sweeping visions. But when I press him on how he hopes to build a Facebook that shows everyone more than just what they want to see, he is still light on the details.

Zuckerberg says that breaking open the echo chambers into which Facebook users have sorted themselves will take more than showing people opinions that contradict their own. “The research suggests that showing one opposite opinion entrenches your belief even further,” he says. “The goal is to show a more complete picture of the whole. There are things we can do that can serve different viewpoints, help you see an issue on a spectrum and then decide for yourself where you want to be.”

How that works in practice is unclear. Zuckerberg isn’t parting the curtain to show the technology behind the rhetoric. He does say that algorithms alone can’t deliver that range—that as with efforts to remove inappropriate content and fake news, Facebook will depend on a blend of automation and human intelligence. But it’s the particulars that matter.

“It is important to remember that people program algorithms. Facebook can tweak anything it wants. But we really have no idea what is going into the recipe,” says Nikki Usher, a professor of new media and technology at George Washington University. Of Zuckerberg’s stubborn idealism, she says he’s hardly alone in not wanting to let go of his assumptions. Political scientists, social scientists, and economists are going through similar struggles amid the populist surge in the US and around the world. “He might be in denial, because a lot of the rest of us are,” she says.

Critics have convincingly argued that Facebook’s business model actively discourages any initiative to expose people to perspectives they might disagree with. To keep your attention, Facebook tries to figure out what you want and shows you more of it. It’s optimized for engagement, in the jargon of Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg says he doesn’t see Facebook that way. In his view, Facebook is optimized for “showing people what they think is meaningful.” That’s a compelling ideal. But until Zuckerberg and Facebook offer more real details on how they plan to fix the problems Facebook has created, it’s not a distinction that seems very meaningful.</s>Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has outlined a plan to let artificial intelligence (AI) software review content posted on the social network.

In a letter describing the plan, he said algorithms would eventually be able to spot terrorism, violence, bullying and even prevent suicide.

He admitted Facebook had previously made mistakes in the content it had removed from the website.

But he said it would take years for the necessary algorithms to be developed.

The announcement has been welcomed by an internet safety charity, which had previously been critical of the way the social network had handled posts depicting extreme violence.

In his 5,500-word letter discussing the future of Facebook, Mr Zuckerberg said it was impossible to review the billions of posts and messages that appeared on the platform every day.

“The complexity of the issues we’ve seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community,” he said.

He highlighted the removal of videos related to the Black Lives Matter movement and the historical napalm girl photograph from Vietnam as “errors” in the existing process.

Facebook was also criticised in 2014, following reports that one of the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby spoke online about murdering a soldier, months before the attack.

“We are researching systems that can read text and look at photos and videos to understand if anything dangerous may be happening.

“This is still very early in development, but we have started to have it look at some content, and it already generates about one third of all reports to the team that reviews content.”

He said AI promised to identify problematic material more quickly than humans and could also “identify risks that nobody would have flagged at all, including terrorists planning attacks using private channels”.

“Right now, we’re starting to explore ways to use AI to tell the difference between news stories about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda.”

Mr Zuckerberg said his ultimate aim was to allow people to post largely whatever they liked, within the law, with algorithms detecting what had been uploaded.

Users would then be able to filter their news feed to remove the types of post they did not want to see.

“Where is your line on nudity? On violence? On graphic content? On profanity? What you decide will be your personal settings,” he explained.

“For those who don’t make a decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a referendum.

“It’s worth noting that major advances in AI are required to understand text, photos and videos to judge whether they contain hate speech, graphic violence, sexually explicit content, and more.

“At our current pace of research, we hope to begin handling some of these cases in 2017, but others will not be possible for many years.”

The plan was welcomed by the Family Online Safety Institute, a member of Facebook’s own safety advisory board. The charity had previously criticised the social network for allowing beheading videos to be seen without any warning on its site.

“This letter further demonstrates that Facebook has been responsive to concerns and is working hard to prevent and respond to abuse and inappropriate material on the platform,” said Jennifer Hanley, Fosi’s vice president of legal and policy.

“I also really like the ability for users to customise their own experiences with these developments. It’s important to give users power over their online experiences, and additional tools and controls will be helpful.”
Mark Zuckerberg publishes a new mission statement for his website, Facebook, including the development of artificial intelligence to identify potential tragic events such as suicides before they occur.