Mark Zuckerberg writes another priority note for Facebook, talks of what his site needs to do in 2019

HIGHLIGHTS

• Facebook on Thursday posted a net income of $6.8 billion.
• Facebook recorded a 9 per cent increase in its monthly active users.
• After the earnings Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook's priorities for 2019.

Facebook had a tough year last year. Hit by a string of scandals and a number of data breaches, it faced challenges throughout 2018. So far, it seems 2019 is going to be similarly challenging, even if it is entering the year with strong financial performance. On Thursday, the company posted a net income of $6.8 billion, which was 61 per cent more than what it earned during the final quarter of 2017. Other numbers too were impressive. "Our community and business continue to grow," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement in the company's revenue call.

Apart from Facebook's revenue, its daily and monthly active users too grew by a record 9 per cent. Basically, all those privacy scandals in 2018 didn't exactly deter people from using Facebook. While the company recorded 1.52 billion daily active users for December 2018, its monthly active users for the same time frame stood at 2.32 billion.

After announcing the earnings, Zuckerberg, took to his Facebook page to, well, share the good news, and announce the social media giants priorities for the year 2019. Priorities yet again.

But just like his earlier notes of Facebook priorities this one too was light on specifics and big on words. "On our last call, I talked about our overall strategy as we face some important opportunities and challenges. Today I want to give you an update and talk about our priorities for 2019," Zuckerberg wrote in a 1,775-word long post. What followed was a loosely-worded essay peppered with words like "privacy" and "transparency".

The Facebook founder essentially spoke of four priorities for his company:

-- "Continue making progress on the major social issues facing the internet and our company"

-- "Build new experiences that meaningfully improve people's lives today and set the stage for even bigger improvements in the future"

-- "Keep building our business by supporting the millions of businesses -- mostly small businesses"

-- "Communicate more transparently about what we're doing and the role our services play in the world"

In the first section, he talked about how the company had deployed over 30,000 people to work on safety and security and that it was working with a team of experts globally to determine what speech is acceptable and what isn't.

"Another important issue is the future of privacy and encryption. People really value the privacy that encrypted messaging brings, and we've built the most secure global messaging service in the world. As people increasingly share more privately, we're working on making more of our products end-to-end encrypted by default, and making more of our products ephemeral so your information doesn't stick around forever," he wrote on the issue of privacy.

This is, obviously, aimed at making Facebook systems air-tight so that data breaches, like the one that affected its systems in September last year, don't endanger the safety of user data again. The only problem so far has been that it is difficult to really get convinced about what Facebook is proposing because of all the scandals that have hit company of late.

Next, Zuckerberg talked about the Facebook products that are expected to chart a stronger growth. "On Facebook, I also expect this to be the year where Watch becomes more mainstream...There's a lot of natural activity happening here (Instagram), and this year I expect us to deliver some qualitatively new experiences around that," he wrote.

"Longer term, I remain very focused on building technology that brings people together in new ways, including through AR and VR. I'm looking forward to Oculus Quest shipping this spring -- the feedback there so far has been very positive," Zuckerberg added.

In the third section, Zuckerberg talked about how "investments made in safety, security, privacy, and well-being" had increased the "company's costs and reduced its revenues".

In the final section, he talked about how the company planned to tackle some of its issues. "My approach here is to listen to the critique first, work on addressing our issues, figure out what we believe are the most important principles to uphold, and then go and engage in the debate," he wrote adding, "We're ready to work with people to understand our role and move towards good outcomes -- whether that's regulation on content or data, cooperation on shared threats, working openly to make sure AI best serves people, or just standing up for the kind of open and connected world that we all want to see."

The Zuckerberg essay comes at a time when Facebook is facing heat from Apple, and privacy experts, after it came to light that the social media company paid some teenagers $20 to collect data from their phones, and in the process flouted Apple iOS app store rules. But Zuckerberg doesn't talk about it in his note. He doesn't talk about past. Or present. Only future. And that ultimately is bound to leave people reading it confused.

SOURCE