CEO of Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) Mark Zuckerberg has made it his personal goal to fix Facebook this year.
Facebook was put through the ringer throughout 2017. From the controversy of Russia using Facebook to meddle in the 2016 US election to a range of past employees and other prominent figures declaring Facebook a danger to society, the company has had its share of problems to clean up. Its plan to introduce features such as a “snooze” button to silence certain people’s posts on your feed have been part of the company’s attempts at pulling back, but it’s not enough and Zuckerberg recognizes this.
That’s why he’s declared 2018 to be the year he’s going to try to start fixing Facebook. In a Facebook post from early on Thursday, Zuckerberg declared this to be his “personal challenge” for the year, a tradition he’s been taking on since 2009. “We won’t prevent all mistakes or abuse,” wrote Zuckerberg, “but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools. If we’re successful this year then we’ll end 2018 on a much better trajectory.”
Zuckerberg then went on to talk about how technology used to be viewed with the hope that it was going to be the decentralizing force to return power into the people’s hands, but that now it’s just the opposite. Technology has only given central powers greater control over the people, as was evidenced again and again throughout 2017. Zuckerberg wants to make a change to that.
He didn’t say how he was going to achieve this, or what he would be doing to turn Facebook around – and that’s probably because he himself doesn’t even know yet; he did, after all, call this challenge a learning opportunity – but he ended his post by talking about cryptocurrency and its participation in decentralization. He noted that they had risk attached to them because they were harder to control, but that he was interested in learning more, in studying “the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.”
So, based on that, is it possible that Zuckerberg wants to look into somehow integrating cryptocurrency into his social media platform? What would that even look like? If this is the case, is he doing this just so he can jump on the craze that is crypto at the moment and hope it rubs off some much-needed positive energy on the company? Or is he purely interested in bringing decentralization back into the platform he created that was always meant to “give people the power”?
Maybe 2018 is actually going to be the year that Facebook goes crypto – whatever that means.
Featured Image: Mashable
