Facebook’s New Mission: Bringing the World Closer Together

Facebook has updated their mission statement from “connecting the world” to a new goal, to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been rethinking the social media company’s mission statement according to Bloomberg. Facebook, which is now reportedly very close to having two billion users, has come under fire in recent years for the way many of their users have utilized the Facebook platform. Facebook has been accused of being complicit in the spread of “fake news” as well as allowing extremist content to be hosted on the website. “Our mission of connecting people, that was not supposed to be controversial,” Zuckerberg said speaking to Bloomberg. “So now the question is, why is that a controversial thing, and how do you rebuild that?”

Zuckerberg believes that one of the ways to improve the Facebook platform is to bring users closer together. The companies new mission statement was revealed today at Facebook’s first Communities Summit in Chicago which was designed to connect the administrators of a variety of Facebook groups. Zuckerberg believes that these group administrators are now as important as Facebook’s software developers and advertisers. This Community Summit was envisioned as a smaller version of Facebook’s F8 developer’s conference where Facebook announces major changes and innovations to their platform.

The Communities Summit was structured around teaching up to 300 moderators how to use the newly developed Facebook Community Tools, which are one of the companies biggest efforts to address the issues many have had with how Facebook operates within a modern democracy. “When enough of us feel a sense of support in our own lives, we can start to care about broader issues, too,” Zuckerberg said during his keynote. Multiple new tools for Facebook’s Groups service were announced, aimed at giving moderators more control over spam and extremist content that may be posted within their Facebook groups. Facebook aims to have 1 billion people involved in “meaningful groups.”

“If we do this, it will not only reverse the whole decline in community membership we’ve seen for the last decade, it’s going to strengthen our overall social fabric and bring the world closer together,” said Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO also discussed his meetings with community leaders during his current challenge to visit all 50 states in America. “It’s just an amazing amount of work that these people are jumping through hoops to do,” he said. “And I just think, if we made that easier, how many more communities like that could you create?”