Facebook Has a New Mission CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will continue working to 'give people a voice and help people connect,' but this new mission statement takes things a step further.
This story originally appeared on PCMag
Over the past decade, Facebook's mission has been to make the world more open and connected. Going forward, however, its goal is to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together," Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday.
Facebook will continue working to "give people a voice and help people connect," but this new mission statement takes things a step further.
"Our society is still divided," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. "I believe we have a responsibility to do even more. It's not enough to simply connect the world."
He went on to say that the "greatest opportunities and challenges" of the next generation -- things like "ending poverty, curing diseases, stopping climate change, spreading freedom and tolerance [and] stopping violence" -- will only be solved collaboratively, when groups and nations work together. Change, he added, has to start locally.
"We have to build a world where every single person has a sense of purpose and community," the Facebook co-founder wrote. "That's how we'll bring the world closer together."
Zuckerberg also wrote about the importance of community in a nearly 6,000-word letter he posted in February. Facebook wants to foster a supportive, safe, informed, civically engaged and inclusive community, he wrote. But with almost 2 billion Facebook users, that last bit -- inclusivity -- can be tough.
"In the last year, the complexity of the issues we've seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community," Zuckerberg wrote, pointing to incidents like the removal of a famous Vietnam War photograph and the live police shooting video of Philando Castile (both of which were later returned to the site).
"This has been painful for me because I often agree with those criticizing us that we're making mistakes," Zuckerberg wrote at the time, before pledging to allow Facebook "to permit more newsworthy and historical content, even if some is objectionable."
Zuckerberg's latest post comes as Facebook today also announced some new features designed to help admins grow and manage their groups. For starters, admins can now schedule posts in advance to run at a specific day and time. Facebook will also now show admins real-time metrics about their group, including the times that members are most engaged.
The process of accepting new users should be less time consuming going forward. That's because admins can now sort and filter membership requests based on common categories like gender and location, then accept or decline everyone at once.
It'll also be easier able to clean up posts from bad actors. Admins can now remove a person and the content they created within the group -- including posts, comments and other people they added to the community -- in one step.
Facebook is also testing a group-to-group linking feature that lets admins recommend similar or related groups to their members.
