Zuckerberg’s Goal for Facebook: Not to Be ‘Liked, But to Be Understood’

In a recent post to his own platform, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that his goal for the next decade is not to be liked, but to be “understood.”

In a post to Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed his plans for the future of the company at one point stating his goal for the decade is to be “understood” but not necessarily liked. Zuckerberg stated: “My goal for this next decade isn’t to be liked, but to be understood.”

The CEO discussed some of the issues the company has faced in recent years and how it has lost the trust of the public. Zuckerberg writes:

One critique of our approach for much of the last decade was that because we wanted to be liked, we didn’t always communicate our views as clearly because we were worried about offending people. So this led to some positive but shallow sentiment towards us and towards the company.

In order to be trusted, people need to know what you stand for. So we’re going to focus more on communicating our principles, whether that’s standing up for giving people a voice against those who would censor people who don’t agree with them, standing up for letting people build their own communities against those who say that the new types of communities forming on social media are dividing us, standing up for encryption against those who say that privacy mostly helps bad people, standing up for giving small businesses more opportunity and sophisticated tools against those who say that targeted advertising is a problem, or standing up for serving every person in the world against those who say that you have to pay a premium in order to really be served.

These positions aren’t always going to be popular, but I think it’s important for us to take these debates head-on.

Zuckerberg further noted that the coming year will be a huge test for the social media site as the US presidential campaigns begin, especially given accusations Facebook received on the role the site played in the 2016 election cycle. Zuckerberg stated:

We’re very focused on election integrity, and this is an area where I’m proud of the progress that we’ve made preventing foreign interference…After working to protect elections in countries across the world from the EU to India to Mexico to the US midterms for the past few years, we think our systems are now more advanced than any other companies. We’re often alerting law enforcement and intelligence about threats that we identify. There’s still going to be debate about what kinds of political speech should be allowed, especially as the 2020 elections heat up, but by any objective measure, our efforts in election integrity have made a lot of progress.

He discussed the company’s actions during the 2016 electing, writing that the company was “behind where it needed to be:”

In 2016, I think it’s very fair to say that we were behind where we needed to be, as with the rest of the industry and governments as well…Now the good news is that since then, it’s not like this is the first presidential election that we’ve had to play a part in defending the integrity of. There have been major elections across the world, and each time, we’re able to see the tactics of the foreign adversaries evolve. Because we and others weren’t really focused on that in 2016 as much, we’ve been able to improve at quite a fast rate. There are also good partnerships in place now across the industry, across law enforcement, the intelligence communities, not just in the US, but across other countries, too. So I think the systems are much more robust.

Read Zuckerberg’s full post on Facebook here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com