It has been a long time coming. On the 15-year anniversary of the popular social network, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the company will spend more than $3.7 billion this year to improve the safety and security on the platform.
“We've made real progress on these issues and built some of the most advanced systems in the world to address them, but there's a lot more to do. We're now taking steps that wouldn't have been possible even just a few years ago -- for example, this year we plan to spend more on safety and security than our whole revenue at the time of our IPO, and the artificial intelligence required to help manage content at scale didn't exist until recently. But as people use these networks to shape society, it's critical we continue making progress on these questions,” said Zuckerberg in a post on Facebook.
In many ways, this was perhaps a reference to Facebook’s revenue in 2011, the year it went public—it has registered $3.7 billion in revenue at the time. While Zuckerberg has not given an exact figure in terms of what Facebook will actually spend on improving data safety and user security this year, the comment does mean it will likely be more than $3.7 billion.
This comes just after Facebook reported very strong Q4 2018 earnings. The social network;s income rose 61 percent to $6.9 billion for the October-December 2018 quarter, up from $4.26 billion in the same quarter in 2017—and that was even before the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal broke out early last year. Revenue increased to $16.9 billion, up from $12.97 billion in the same quarter the year before. Facebook had also reported that on an average, 1.52 billion people using Facebook every day in December 2018, which is an increase of 9 percent year on year. Monthly active users, now at 2.32 billion, were also up 9 percent year on year.
Interestingly, Facebook had earlier confirmed during the earnings call that it now has as many as 30,000 people working on improving the safety and security on the social media network, including third-party staffers such as those who verify fake news.
In his Facebook post, Zuckerberg also addressed the critics while defending the social network, suggesting that long term changes in society are giving more power to more users. “To the contrary, while any rapid social change creates uncertainty, I believe what we're seeing is people having more power, and a long term trend reshaping society to be more open and accountable over time. We're still in the early stages of this transformation and in many ways it is just getting started. But if the last 15 years were about people building these new networks and starting to see their impact, then the next 15 years will be about people using their power to remake society in ways that have the potential to be profoundly positive for decades to come,” wrote Zuckerberg.
It has previously been reported that Facebook is moving from a new assessment system for employees to understand whether they are helping bring about a social change or not. “So in a nutshell: Facebook’s moving from a focus on growth, to a focus on change,” a Facebook spokeswoman has confirmed to CNBC. The new criteria to measure employee performance and impact will be in place this year.
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