Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook's horrible year was pretty good, actually

In a year-in-review post, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday he is “proud of the progress we’ve made.”

Yes, he really is that deluded.

Zuckerberg said some of Facebook’s problems with misinformation and protecting users’ personal data will take years to solve.

“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 wrote.

Zuck claims Facebook now has 30,000 workers focused on safety, or roughly one Facebook safety employee per every 75,600 monthly active users.

“Mark Zuckerberg used the word ‘progress’ six times in his year-end self-assessment,” notes Ryan Mac. “That’s one way of looking at Facebook’s 2018.”

From Ryan’s Buzzfeed post:

Though much of what Zuckerberg wrote on Friday is not new — it is mostly rehashed from previous talking points — the Facebook chief’s note underscored the notion that Facebook will never be perfect. Zuckerberg acknowledges that election interference and harmful speech “can never be fully solved”

“That doesn’t mean we’ll 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 notes.

As if to prove his point, one of the final scandals the company faced in 2018? An admission on Wednesday from one of its early investors, Reid Hoffman, who said he financed a misinformation campaign in the during the 2017 special election for an Alabama Senate seat. Facebook has not taken action against Hoffman’s account and said an investigation remains ongoing.

Below, tweets today from former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, and reporting by others on what’s at stake with the social media giant as we enter 2019.