Mark Zuckerberg Says It Will Take 3 Years to Fix Facebook

A Q&A with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg knew his keynote speech at F8 in 2018 would not be like any other. "That's going to be what this whole conference is about," he says. "On the one hand the responsibilities around keeping people safe—the election integrity, fake news, data privacy and all those issues are just really key. And on the other hand, we also have a responsibility to our community to keep building the experiences that people expect from us. Part of the challenge of where we are is making sure that we take both seriously. F8 is going to be a balance of those two points."

Zuckerberg recognizes the difficulty of remaking his systems to proactively catch harmful content. "I think this is about a three-year transition to really build up the teams, because you can't just hire thirty thousand people overnight to go do something," he says. "You have to make sure that they're executing well and bring in the leadership and train them. And building up AI tools—that's not something that you could just snap your fingers on either." But Zuckerberg says the three-year journey is already well under way. "The good news is that we started it pretty early last year. So we're about a year in. I think by the end of this year we'll have turned the corner on a lot of it. We'll never be fully done. But I do really think that this represents a pretty major shift in the overall business model and operating model of the company."