There seems no stopping in the forward march of the most popular social network in the world. Facebook is making inroads into the television market in a race of sorts with YouTube, a new frontier for their tech advancements. Meanwhile, their main social media platform is fast approaching another milestone, that of having 5 billion active users monthly.
The entire Facebook service has done its best to follow the path laid out by its Mission Statement from founder Mark Zuckerberg: “Making the world more open and connected.” However, a rise of negative trends in how the social network has evolved spurred Zuckerberg to change their marching orders to “Bringing the world closer together.”
Closer together
This big change in Facebook’s mission statement was done by CEO Mark Zuckerberg Thursday, June 22 during the Facebook Communities Summit, a major gathering of FB Group admins.
The event was touched upon in Zuckerberg’s February humanitarian manifesto and announced last April.
Its purpose was for empowering the various admin leaders on active Facebook groups by introducing a series of new management tools for their exclusive use. But this occasion also served as an impromptu platform for the Social Network pioneer to announce the new general direction for his creation.
In his speech, Zuckerberg noted how the old mission statement regarding openness and connectivity assumed that once Facebook has accomplished the connections then the world will become more open.
The reality that the world remains “divided” in his opinion, is what spurred Zuckerberg to make a shift in what the company and its social media platform must accomplish in general.
“We have a responsibility to do more,” Zuckerberg declared. “Not just to connect the world but to bring the world closer together.”
A goal instead of a philosophy
At present, Facebook statistics show that only 100 million of its billions of users are “meaningful” Group members; that is, those who make meaningful contributions to the groups they belong to.
The changing of the mission statement was mostly catalyzed by the upsurge of the notorious “Fake News” articles that popped up on Facebook leading up to the 2016 Presidential Election.
“Bringing the world closer together” seeks to mend the divisions that formed from these conflict sources as well as a rally for truthfulness in content.
Therefore as Mark Zuckerberg sees it, the new mission statement is not a guiding philosophy but an end goal to strive for.
How Facebook will keep true to its change in mission statement will serve as an acid test on whether the company running the social media can stop thinking like a business and act more as a medium of connectivity.
Zuckerberg laid out how it may best be achieved in his Harvard commencement speech last March, extolling people to help one another “to create the world where every single person has a sense of purpose.”
