The social network, which claims to have two billion users, was criticized last year. In particular, Facebook was accused of not effectively combating problematic content, such as calling for hate, defending terrorism or so-called fake news. This coincided with allegations that Russia had interfered with the US presidential campaign via Google, Twitter and Facebook.
His personal challenge for the New Year was “the solution to these important questions,” wrote the 33-year-old CEO. Not all mistakes could be avoided. But right now, Facebook made too many mistakes in terms of compliance and abuse prevention, Zuckerberg admitted.
New push for mobile payment
Zuckerberg also mentioned “encryption and cryptocurrencies” among the possible solution examples. These technologies could help large corporations such as Facebook to regain lost user trust. This is also due to the fact that they “take power out of centralized systems and put them back into the hands of the people,” says Zuckerberg. This is a risk, but this year he will deal intensively with the “positive and negative aspects of these technologies and how best to use them in our services”.
For several years, Facebook has been trying in vain to break into the mobile payment business. In 2014, the former Paypal president David Marcus was recruited, who now manages the messenger business of Facebook. Marcus has also been part of the board of the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase for a few weeks. As an example for Facebook was always the Chinese market, on WeChat with WePay could revolutionize the payment – there was cash in a matter of years superfluous, almost every company now relies on smartphone payments. Together with AliPay, WeChat Pay dominates this market, which now has around 500 million users. By comparison, the rest of the world has only 556 million mobile payment accounts.
