Despite Scandals, Zuckerberg is Proud of Facebook's 2018

By: Yassmine ElSayed

CAIRO, Jan. 2 (SEE) - Mark Zuckerberg said he is proud of the progress the company made to improve its platform in 2018.

His talk came in an annual year-end post on Facebook.

"I'm proud of the progress we've made in 2018 and grateful to everyone who has helped us get here," Zuckerberg said.

However according to a report published by CNN, Facebook (FB) had a scandal-plagued year that left many customers furious, drove the company's stock down, invited scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, and bruised the carefully-crafted public reputations of once-venerated executives like Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.

On his part, Zuckerberg insisted the company has changed in his post.

"We're a very different company today than we were in 2016, or even a year ago. We've fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm in all our services, and we've systematically shifted a large portion of our company to work on preventing harm," he said.

Zuckerberg said addressing the issues that have been plagued Facebook is a challenge that will take more than one year, but that the company has "established multi-year plans to overhaul our systems and we're well into executing those roadmaps."

"In the past we didn't focus as much on these issues as we needed to, but we're now much more proactive."

Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook won't be able to "catch every bad actor or piece of bad content, or that people won't find more examples of past mistakes before we improved our systems." He also said the problems of election interference or harmful speech can never be solved.

"But overall, we've built some of the most advanced systems in the world for identifying and resolving these issues, and we will keep improving over the coming years," he said.

Facebook had improved its systems for preventing election interference and is removing millions of fake accounts every day, according to Zuckerberg. It has partnered with fact-checkers in countries around the world to identify misinformation, created new standards for advertising transparency, established an independent election research commission to study threats, and partnered with governments and law enforcement to prepare for elections.

"Here's to a great new year to come," he concluded.