Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said Friday the world's biggest social network has "fundamentally" changed to focus on securing its systems against manipulation and misinformation.
Capping a tumultuous year marked by data protection scandals and government probes, Zuckerberg said he was "proud of the progress we've made" in addressing Facebook's problems.
"For 2018, my personal challenge has been to focus on addressing some of the most important issues facing our community - whether that's preventing election interference, stopping the spread of hate speech and misinformation, making sure people have control of their information, and ensuring our services improve people's well-being," he wrote on his Facebook page.
"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 Facebook now has more than 30,000 people "working on safety" and invests billions of dollars in security.
Zuckerberg's comments come at the close of a year when Facebook was roiled by revelations about the misuse of personal data by the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 US election and on data sharing with business partners.