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.” </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> 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> ’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> 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’s Zuckerberg announces campaign against misuse of platform

Hours after Facebook reported that a political data-sharing scandal affected almost 40 million more of the social network’s users than previously believed, CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday outlined a multiyear campaign to fight election interference by foreign governments and Internet trolls.

In an hour-long phone call with reporters, Zuckerberg acknowledged that disinformation campaigns during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign caught his company unprepared, a mistake he said he was determined not to repeat.

“I’m confident we’re making progress against these adversaries, but they’re very sophisticated,” Zuckerberg said. “And it would be a mistake to think they’re going to give up or stop doing what they’re doing.”

His comments capped a whirlwind day of news in which Facebook reported that up to 87 million of its users may have had their data improperly accessed by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm connected to President Trump’s election campaign. The previous estimate had been 50 million. Facebook on Wednesday also significantly restricted the user data that apps and their developers can access through the social network.

A day earlier, the Menlo Park company removed 70 Facebook and 65 Instagram accounts, along with 138 Facebook pages, controlled by the Internet Research Agency, an organization tied to the Russian government and accused of running disinformation campaigns to benefit the Kremlin. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 12 agency workers for interfering in the 2016 election.

Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify next week at a joint hearing of the Senate’s Judiciary and Commerce committees and before the House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committee, and his comments may have represented a preview.

He called it “a mistake” when shortly after the election he dismissed the possibility that fake news spread across the network had played a role in the election’s outcome. He acknowledged that the company now faces a crisis in public confidence — severe enough to trigger a “#deletefacebook” movement — and said Facebook could no longer take a hands-off approach to what people do with its worldwide platform.

“It’s such a big service that’s so central to people’s lives,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re not just building tools. We need to take responsibility for the outcome of how people use those tools as well.”

The company’s efforts to confront potential election interference, he said, involved dealing with three distinct problems, each with its own possible solutions.

Some of the people spreading disinformation online, he said, are government-connected actors who must be identified and blocked, even as they create a bewildering number of online accounts for disguise.

“People are setting up these large networks of fake accounts, like the (Internet Research Agency) had done, and what we need to do is track it really carefully so we can remove them entirely,” Zuckerberg said. “We take them down and treat that as a security issue.”

At the same time, others spreading disinformation do it strictly for economic reasons. Rather than pursuing some larger political strategy, they post sensational stories to attract readers and make money on advertising.

“If we can just make it so the economics no longer work for them, they’ll move on to something else,” Zuckerberg said. “I mean, these are literally the same people who were sending you Viagra ads in the ’90s.”

Finally, there are users posting political content that isn’t fraudulent but is skewed, cherry-picking facts to make a point. Partnering with fact-checking organizations and favoring stories from established journalism outlets can help address that issue, Zuckerberg said.

“I do think this is a multiyear effort,” he said. “My hope is that by the end of this year, we’ll have turned the corner on a lot of these issues, and people will see things are getting better. But these are big issues.”

Revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook user data reignited a long-simmering debate in Silicon Valley, Washington and around the world about whether online companies do enough to protect the vast troves of information they collect on their users.

“Facebook now plays a critical role in many social relationships, informing Americans about current events, and pitching everything from products to political candidates,” said Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, in a statement. “Our joint hearing will be a public conversation with the CEO of this powerful and influential company about his vision for addressing problems that have generated significant concern about Facebook’s role in our democracy, bad actors using the platform, and user privacy.”

Facebook’s openness to third-party developers helped establish it as a force in social networking and fueled its fast growth over the past decade. But Facebook has reconsidered its policies following revelations that Cambridge Analytica obtained data unscrupulously through an academic who tricked Facebook users into handing over information about themselves and their friends with an online quiz.

Facebook said Wednesday that it was closing down a range of services, known as application programming interfaces or APIs, that developers use, and tightening rules for others.

The company is restricting access to data, requiring advertisers to verify that users have opted in to data sharing and taking other steps to make it harder to obtain users’ data surreptitiously through apps.

Some of the new restrictions will hurt developers who build apps using Facebook’s relationships with billions of users and the information they post.

It’s a sharp reversal. In 2014, Facebook, facing criticism from developers that rapid-fire changes to the rules they had to observe were breaking their apps and forcing them to constantly update their software, promised to wait two years after announcing changes to roll them out. That would afford developers plenty of time to make adjustments.

Wednesday’s announcement was an explicit breach of that promise, with most of the changes effective immediately.

A Facebook spokeswoman declined to offer comment beyond Zuckerberg’s remarks in the phone call.

“Innovation demands iteration; it requires constant change,” wrote Ime Archibong, Facebook’s vice president of partnerships, in a blog post announcing the tightening of rules. “And, while change is never easy, we believe the immediate platform updates we are announcing today will build stronger connections for people, developers and businesses in the future, while maintaining their privacy and security on Facebook.” </s> Mark Zuckerberg is on Capitol Hill to deliver one of the most high-profile mea culpas in tech history.

The 33-year-old multibillionaire is testifying before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Commerce Committee on Tuesday and then talking to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday.

His task: to answer questions about the biggest scandal to hit Facebook since it was founded 14 years ago and to reassure lawmakers, investors, advertisers and 2.2 billion users that Facebook can be trusted with their data.

"My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together," Zuckerberg said in prepared remarks released Monday ahead of Wednesday's House committee meeting. "Advertisers and developers will never take priority over that as long as I'm running Facebook."

Zuckerberg has a lot of convincing to do. In March, Facebook was forced to acknowledge that data about millions of users was shared without their permission. That admission came only after a whistleblower gave the details to The New York Times and The Guardian's Observer, which revealed that University of Cambridge lecturer Aleksandr Kogan had created an app several years ago that could collect profile, location and friends data for hundreds of thousands of people by promising a personality quiz in exchange.

Through those people, he was able to collect friends information from as many as 87 million people's profiles, Facebook said. Kogan then reportedly passed along all that info to a UK-based political data analytics firm called Cambridge Analytics.

Facebook found out about the episode and in 2015 asked Kogan and Cambridge Analytica to sign documents promising the data had been destroyed. It didn't publicly disclose any of this until a day before the news stories about the arrangement were published.

The news that Facebook lost control of its users' data, and that it said nothing publicly in the years since, has raised a fundamental question of trust in the world's largest social network. Facebook is a free service that makes its money -- more than $40 billion in sales in 2017 -- by capitalizing on the details and information that its users share.

Some advertisers have already ditched Facebook, users have started a campaign called #DeleteFacebook on Twitter and prominent tech executives -- including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook -- have berated the company. Musk, who deleted Tesla and SpaceX pages from Facebook, said the social network gave him "the willies."

"It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm," Zuckerberg said in his prepared testimony. "That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake."

Interest in Zuckerberg's testimony has only been exacerbated by the company's mishandling of the scandal. Facebook put out a statement late on a Friday before the initial stories were published, then Zuckerberg remained silent for days before finally agreeing to a few interviews. In those interviews, he began the line he's followed since: He's sorry, Facebook screwed up, and they're going to fix this.

Zuckerberg has two jobs while appearing at this week's hearings. His first is to apologize -- believably -- according to public relations and policy experts. The second is reassure the lawmakers he's answering to, who will likely use the event to grandstand against the California-based CEO.

"With all of the data exchanged over Facebook and other platforms, users deserve to know how their information is shared and secured," Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the US Senate's Committee on the Judiciary, said in a statement last week.

Not everyone's convinced Zuckerberg will succeed. Saturday Night Live skewered him over the weekend, with an impression of Zuckerberg as being unwilling to delete people's data ("You gave it to me. No backsies," parody-Zuckerberg said) and uncaring about the magnitude of the scandal around him. "Sure, maybe Facebook sold out our democracy to Russian troll farms. My bad?" SNL's faux Zuckerberg said with a snarky shrug.

Meanwhile, the real Zuckerberg has promised to fix networks' issues around "privacy, safety and democracy." In response to the scandal, Facebook has reset its advertising and data policies. For example, it's its stopped working with third-party data providers like Acxiom and Experian to help marketers target ads at Facebook users. It's also booted other data analysis firms, including AggregateIQ and CubeYou, that have been accused of misusing data.

The social network is also limiting the data it will share with outside developers. Facebook is going to approve all apps that request access to information such as check-ins, likes, photos, posts, videos, events and groups.

Facebook's "Login" feature for easily signing up to use apps, which Kogan's app used to collect the data he allegedly passed onto Cambridge Analytica, will also be further locked down. As of last week, software developers won't be able to ask for personal information, such as religious affiliation, political views, relationship status, education and work history.

Facebook also said last week it's disabling a feature that allowed you to search for other users' profiles by typing phone numbers and email addresses into the social network's search box. Facebook said that left users vulnerable to having their public profiles "scraped," or collected, by bad actors. The company also put more limits on what information developers could gather from a handful of Facebook services, including its Events, Groups and Pages features. For example, apps will no longer get to see the guest list for an Event page, or the member list for a Group page.

In his testimony, Zuckerberg said that even if foreign actors or third-party developers misbehave, the buck stops with him. "I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here," he said. "It will take some time to work through all of the changes we need to make, but I'm committed to getting it right."

Cambridge Analytica: Everything you need to know about Facebook's data mining scandal.

iHate: CNET looks at how intolerance is taking over the internet. </s> In an attempt to off-set the adverse publicity that the world's biggest social media site has received in recent weeks, Facebook's head Mark Zuckerberg has declared that all “large” pages will be audited. Based on this any page which does not clear the process will be prevented from posting.In a Facebook message, Zuckerbeg writes his site will "require people who manage large pages to be verified as well. This will make it much harder for people to run pages using fake accounts, or to grow virally and spread misinformation or divisive content that way." There is no definition as to what constitutes a "large" page. How large a page is depends on range of factors, such as the nature of the business; content types (text, image, video, and so on); the topic and share-ability of content; the frequency of posts; the promptness in replies; and overall engagement with fans and followers. Moreover, some types of pages are more influential than others. A cookery site with a lager following than a 'news' site will be less influential, in turns of shaping public opinion, than the news site, meaning the credibility of the news site is a more pressing matter.In the same Facebook message, Mark Zuckerberg also said that he was going to tighten up the rules on advertising. Here the social media mogul writes : "every advertiser who wants to run political or issue ads will need to be verified. To get verified, advertisers will need to confirm their identity and location."The tighter control on advertisers is a reaction to activities from the groups like the Internet Research Agency , the so-called Russian “troll farm”, which had an undue influence over the most recent U.S. presidential election and the tight contest between Trump and Clinton.Next week, Zuckerberg begins a round of Congressional hearings into Facebook’s handling of data and other issues. This partly a public relations exercise and partly an attempted to convince advertisers, users and politicians that the company has learned lessons from political interference and the significant data trust breaches surrounding Cambridge Analytica (see " Facebook suspends Trump linked data firm ").In related news, researchers have demonstrated just how easy it is to create fake video news through the use of archival footage and artificial intelligence. See the Digital Journal report " Artificial intelligence can be used to shape fake news ." </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.
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.