Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook has multi-year plans to overhaul its systems

Saying goodbye to one of his toughest years filled with several controversies Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he is proud of the progress in 2018 and the company has now established multiyear plans to overhaul its systems and is executing those roadmapsIn a yearend note on Friday the 34yearold Zuckerberg said his personal challenge has been to focus on preventing election interference stopping the spread of hate speech and misinformation making sure people have control of their information and ensuring his services improve peoples wellbeingThis however does not mean Facebook will catch every bad actor or piece of bad content on its platform he saidTo be clear addressing these issues is more than a oneyear challenge For some of these issues like election interference or harmful speech the problems can never be fully solved the Facebook CEO lamentedBut weve now established multiyear plans to overhaul our systems and were well into executing those roadmaps added Zuckerberg who faced intense scrutiny over Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018Scandals surrounding Facebook started surfacing in such higher frequencies that industry observers began questioning if the social media giant with over two billion users would be able to survive in the long termLeading the charge of the attack on Internet monopolies was American billionaire investor George Soros who warned that social media companies can have adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy and that the days of the USbased IT giants were numberedScrutiny of Facebook increased manifold since it revealed earlier in 2018 how a Londonbased political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica that worked for US President Donald Trumps campaign improperly got access to data of up to 87 million usersAppearing before a US Congress Committee in April Zuckerberg apologised for the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal Were a very different company today than we were in 2016 or even a year ago Weve fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm in all our services the Facebook CEO stressedWe now have more than 30000 people working on safety and invest billions of dollars in security yearly he added In May he appeared before the European Parliament to respond to questions surrounding the companys business practices its plans on fighting misinformation on the platform and protecting user privacy among othersFor preventing election interference weve improved our systems for identifying the fake accounts and coordinated information campaigns that account for much of the interference now removing millions of fake accounts every day said Zuckerberg in the yearend noteFor stopping the spread of harmful content weve built AI systems to automatically identify and remove content related to terrorism hate speech and more before anyone even sees it he said adding that these systems take down 99 per cent of the terroristrelated content before anyone even reports itMore than two billion people use one of Facebook services every day People have come together using these tools to raise more than 1 billion for causes and to find more than 1 million new jobs More than 90 million small businesses use our tools and more than half say theyve hired more people because of them said ZuckerbergCatch up on all the latest Crime National International and Hatke news here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updatesThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever