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. 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. “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. 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. 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.
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.