Amid unceasing criticism of Facebook’s immense power and pernicious impact on society, its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced Thursday that his “personal challenge” for 2018 will be “to focus on fixing these important issues”. “Facebook has a lot of work to do – whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page. Facebook, like other tech giants, has long maintained that it is essentially politically neutral – the company has “community standards” but no clearly articulated political orientation. But the second half of Zuckerberg’s post, in which he discusses centralization and decentralization of power in technology, reveal Zuckerberg’s general approach: proposing technological solutions to political problems. If Zuckerberg is interested in decentralization of power, he might wish to address his company’s pattern of aggressively acquiring its competitors – or simply copying their features.

Source: The Guardian January 04, 2018 19:52 UTC