Editor

Each year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gives himself a personal challenge. Run one mile a day. Read a book every other week. Eat only what he kills.

For 2018, however, Zuckerberg is essentially challenging himself to do better at his day job.

Zuckerberg said Thursday his personal challenge for 2018 is working to prevent Facebook from being misused in ways that potentially do harm to its billions of users and to society at large.

“The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post Thursday. “My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues.”

Zuckerberg continued: “We won’t prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools. If we’re successful this year then we’ll end 2018 on a much better trajectory.”

The admission of Facebook’s shortcomings in protecting its platform, and Zuckerberg’s goal to double down on addressing them, comes after a bruising year for the company.

Related: Silicon Valley’s ‘gut-wrenching’ year confronting its dark side

Facebook, along with Twitter (TWTR) and Google (GOOGL), has come under fire since the 2016 presidential election for its role in spreading fake news, enabling polarizing filter bubbles, and not catching Russian propaganda campaigns.

Late last year, executives from Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR) and Google (GOOG) were grilled by Congress over their role in the 2016 election. Some in Congress raised alarms about the immense power of these platforms and their seeming inability to police themselves.

There have also been troubling headlines for Facebook from abroad. Facebook has been described as enabling ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. And Facebook’s WhatsApp was cited as a cause of beatings in India after a fake news story went viral on the messaging service.

After years of maintaining an unwavering optimism about the social network, Zuckerberg and other Facebook insiders have been forced to confront the dark side of what they built.

In one remarkably candid post for Yom Kippur last year, Zuckerberg apologized for “the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together.”

Acknowledging a problem is one thing, finding a solution is another.

In the post Thursday, Zuckerberg admitted Facebook’s problems touch on “questions of history, civics, political philosophy, media, government, and of course technology.”

“I’m looking forward to bringing groups of experts together to discuss and help work through these topics,” he said.

The New Year’s challenge is just the latest example of a shift in Zuckerberg’s public posture about Facebook. In the first days after the 2016 election, Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on the social network influenced the outcome.

Yet, Facebook spent much of 2017 trying to address exactly that concern. The company waged a global fight against fake news by cracking down on tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts, partnering with fact checkers and running full-page ads in newspapers with tips to spot fabricated stories.

Zuckerberg also made it his personal challenge for 2017 to break out of the Silicon Valley bubble and meet with people in every state. The move fueled speculation Zuckerberg wanted to run for president, but some in the tech industry instead saw it as an attempt to assess the unintended consequences of his company.

“Zuck isn’t running for President,” Nathan Hubbard, a former Twitter executive, tweeted last June. “He’s trying to understand the role the product he created played in getting this one elected.

While the federal Liberal government has shown support for science by appointing a Chief Science Advisor for the Prime Minister, a new report suggests additional science advisers in individual departments of the government could do more to ensure that political decisions are based on good scientific evidence.

Most politicians do not have a science background, yet many decisions over issues such as climate change, environment, food safety, fisheries, agriculture, space exploration and public health, involve scientific concepts that are often overlooked or misrepresented during the political decision-making process. That’s because the science is only one of many factors politicians must consider: there’s also the effect on the economy, loss of jobs, business interests, and perhaps the biggest factor in the political world, public perception. If those other factors are considered to be more important, then science can be pushed aside, despite good evidence to the contrary.

It was because of these other factors that the previous Conservative government under Stephen Harper reportedly eliminated the position of science adviser, cut back on science funding, and muzzled federal scientists from speaking about their work, for the sake of preserving the economy, in part, supported by the fossil fuel industry.

A similar effect is currently at work in the U.S., where President Donald Trump has pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and believes that climate change is a hoax. And globally, carbon emissions continue to climb worldwide despite highly publicized international agreements with promises to cut back.

To help keep good science at the forefront of Canadian political decisions, a report in FACETS — a new Canadian, open access, multidisciplinary science journal — is suggesting a host of specialist science advisors to work in departments such as Environment Canada, the Canadian Space Agency, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, or Health Canada. They could be called upon by the Chief Science Advisor to provide advice in those specific areas. This makes sense since one scientist cannot be expected to be an expert in all fields of science.

In addition to providing accurate scientific information internally for the government, the report’s authors also suggest that these departmental advisers provide:

• Outreach services.
• Communicate to the public about Canadian scientific research.
• Provide expert opinions when issues such as food safety or environmental concerns arise in the media.

This last function is important because there is a wealth of misinformation out there misleading the public. From the idea that the moon landings were faked, to chem-trails in the atmosphere controlling our minds, most of them are harmless entertainment.

But some can have serious consequences, such as the effect of a single scientific paper that came out in 1998 linking vaccines to autism. Even though this report has been proven to be poorly done, wrong in its conclusions and even fraudulent, and despite strong scientific evidence that vaccines are effective in preventing disease, the idea spread, generating fear and confusion among parents who decided to avoid vaccinations for their children just to be safe. As a result, new outbreaks of measles are now appearing among children, including in the U.S.

As a society, we face some hard decisions about how we proceed in the 21st century in a sustainable way without compromising the environment, resources of food, water, or land, while controlling disease, providing clean energy, and basically ensuring the survival of the human species.

Science has already pointed the way to many solutions to these issues, but the scientific perspective has often been ignored for a “business as usual” approach that does not disturb the status quo. With proper scientific information, both for the public and politicians, intelligent decisions can be made to advance our civilization without going bankrupt in the process.