CT – Citing a need to help users find purpose and meaning by bringing them closer together, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says his company will be shifting its mission to focus on building communities that help to connect people with each other like churches and Little League clubs do.
Facebook has been using artificial intelligence to recommend groups to users, and Mr Zuckerberg says the approach led to a 50 per cent increase in people joining them, within six months.
However, while the site has almost two billion users, Mr Zuckerberg says “only” 100 million of them are currently part of “meaningful communities”. He wants that figure to rise to a billion
“The thing that I think we all need to do right now is work to bring people closer together. And I think that this is actually so important that we’re gonna change Facebook’s whole mission as a company in order to focus on this,” Zuckerberg announced at the inaugural Facebook Communities Summit in Chicago, Illinois, last Thursday.
He explained that over the last decade, Facebook which now has close to 2 billion users, had been working on making the world more focused and connected. While this has happened to some degree, he said, society remains “very divided”.
To change that, Zuckerberg now wants to tap into the power of communities the way churches and Little League teams do.
“As I’ve travelled around and learned about different places, one theme is clear: every great community has great leaders. Think about it. A church doesn’t just come together. It has a pastor who cares for the well-being of their congregation, makes sure they have food and shelter.” he said.
“Our communities give us that sense that we’re a part of something greater than ourselves. That we’re not alone and that we have something better ahead to work for. We all get meaning from our communities and whether they’re churches or sports teams or neighborhood groups, they give us the strength to expand our horizons and to care about broader issues,” he said.
“Studies have actually proven that the more connected we are, the happier we are and the healthier we are too. People who go to church are more likely to volunteer and to give to charity, not just because they are religious but also because they are a part of a community,” he noted.
While not pointing to any specific community, the Facebook CEO noted that despite this apparent power of community, people have been slowly disengaging from “all kinds of communities” globally and these people are the target of his new campaign.
“That’s why it is so striking that over the past few decades, membership in all kinds of communities around the world has been declining and a lot of places by as much as one-quarter. That’s a lot of people who now need to find a sense of purpose and support somewhere else. So this is our challenge,” he said. “We have to build a world where every single person has a sense of purpose and community. That’s how we’re going to bring the world closer together.”
Is Mark Zuckerberg a Christian?
The Facebook CEO was once a part of this community after declaring himself an atheist at the age of 13. Last Christmas, however, he revealed that he was no longer atheist but did not specify his new faith.
“I was raised Jewish and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important,” he told a user on Facebook.
male@ugchristiannews.com
Additional Reporting by Christian Post.
