Mark Zuckerberg's 2019 Resolution: to Host Public Discussions on Tech

(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said his personal challenge for 2019 is to host regular public discussions about the future of technology in society.

The chats will focus on “the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes and the anxieties” of how technology will shape human behavior, Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday. He said the chats will help him expand his thinking beyond engineering.

“Every few weeks I’ll talk with leaders, experts, and people in our community from different fields and I’ll try different formats to keep it interesting,” he wrote. “These will all be public, either on my Facebook or Instagram pages or on other media.”

Every year, Zuckerberg comes up with a resolution for himself. In past years he’s learned Mandarin, gone on a tour of U.S. states, and sent daily thank-you notes. In 2011, he challenged himself to only eat meat he killed himself. Lately, his personal challenges have been more aligned with Facebook’s business needs. The company has come under fire the past several years for its data-collection practices, user privacy breaches and information sharing, and its stock fell 26 percent last year. Zuckerberg’s 2018 task was to fix Facebook.

“I’m an engineer, and I used to just build out my ideas and hope they’d mostly speak for themselves,” Zuckerberg said. “But given the importance of what we do, that doesn’t cut it anymore. So I’m going to put myself out there more than I’ve been comfortable with and engage more in some of these debates about the future, the tradeoffs we face, and where we want to go.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Sarah Frier in San Francisco at sfrier1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Andrew Pollack

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