The social network was rocked by a scandal last month involving Cambridge Analytica, a digital consultancy that inappropriately accessed data on as many as 87 million Facebook users.
On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, the 33-year-old CEO of Facebook who’s made billions from his social network, doubled down on that promise.
He did so onstage before 5,000 software developers, assembled media and a host of cameras broadcasting his words worldwide.
The F8 keynote is Zuckerberg’s biggest speech of the year — an address where he often gets personal and talks directly to Facebook’s 2.2 billion users.
Last year, he spoke about the violence being broadcast on Facebook Live, the social network’s livestreaming service.
Even while Mark Zuckerberg apologized on stage for the scourges that have recently haunted Facebook, he tried to get on with business as usual.
Facebook-owned Instagram has taken on many of Snapchat’s top features. Earlier this year, Facebook also stepped up its job postings features in an effort to take on LinkedIn.
The social media site collects information on Facebook users and non-Facebook users from third party websites that use Facebook’s services, like the “Like” plug-in or Facebook “pixels,” which are pieces of code that track what people do off of Facebook.
To combat fake news, Zuckerberg outlined three specific categories it is looking to tackle. This includes fighting typical spam from people trying to make money by removing the economic incentive for these companies to do so, and finding ‘bad actors’ (fake accounts) and taking them off the network.
Zukerberg claimed that Facebook now has new AI tools that are taking down tens of thousands of fake accounts, many of which it has traced back to Russia. It also has 20,000 people responsible for monitoring content on the platform.
Facebook also aims to tackle the issue of real people sharing fake news through content flagging tools, as well as surfacing related content for users to check facts.
