Mark Zuckerberg has a very lofty New Year's resolution: fix the social networking site he started.
"The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do," the Facebook CEO wrote in a Thursday post.
He pointed to the abuse and hate on the platform, along with foreign attempts to spread misinformation, and social networking's effect on a person's well being. Last month, the company acknowledged that passively reading your Facebook news feed isn't always good for your mental health.
"My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues," Zuckerberg said in his post. "We won't prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools."
Zuckerberg said his latest goal "may not seem like a personal challenge on its face." His past challenges have been outside his day-to-day work, and include learning Chinese Mandarin, building an AI for his home, and reading a book every other week. However, Zuckerberg signaled that 2018 is serious year for him.
Recently, Facebook has faced growing criticism from the press and US lawmakers over how it can be abused. Former Facebook executives have also blasted the social networking service for ruining public discourse.
Facebook has vowed to make changes. But on Thursday Zuckerberg said his newest personal challenge will go beyond Facebook; he intends to also examine the role of technology in society. For example, can technology take power away from the people?
Unfortunately, the public is starting to believe it does, Zuckerberg wrote. "With the rise of a small number of big tech companies—and governments using technology to watch their citizens—many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it.
"I'm interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services," Zuckerberg added. "I'm looking forward to bringing groups of experts together to discuss and help work through these topics."