Zuckerberg vows to spend 2018 improving Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg is vowing to devote 2018 to improving Facebook after a year in which the platform was heavily scrutinized over disinformation campaigns and abusive content that proliferated on the site.

“My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Thursday.

“We won’t prevent all mistakes or abuse, 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.”

The Facebook co-founder acknowledged the growing movement that is concerned about the size and influence of giant tech companies, saying that he will take a closer look at tools that give more control to users, citing cryptocurrency and encryption.

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“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,” Zuckerberg wrote.

While he acknowledged that “Facebook has a lot of work to do,” Zuckerberg’s post was light on specific plans for the next year.

In 2017, his company announced some reforms to its advertising practices in an effort to appease lawmakers who accused the social media giant of allowing Russians to easily manipulate its users as part of a campaign to influence the U.S. electorate.

But it’s still unclear what steps Zuckerberg has planned to assuage critics who think that Facebook has accumulated too much unchecked power and influence.

“This will be a serious year of self-improvement and I’m looking forward to learning from working to fix our issues together,” Zuckerberg wrote.