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Zuckerberg says he wants Facebook to work in your best interest

For his 2019 personal challenge, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg wants to talk about how tech will affect society.

Erin Carson Former Senior Writer
Erin Carson covered internet culture, online dating and the weird ways tech and science are changing your life.
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Erin Carson
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Mark Zuckerberg has embarked on his 2019 personal challenge.

James Martin/CNET

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg posted the first video of his personal challenge for 2019.

Zuckerberg, who sets a challenge for himself every year, such as writing an AI program to control his house, said his latest goal is to "get out and have a series of discussions on the future of technology and the internet, and how that's going to affect our society."

In a video posted Wednesday, he visited Harvard Law School and spoke with professor Jonathan Zittrain for nearly two hours on subjects like augmented reality, content review and the challenge of the news feed. 

"We now have more than 30,000 people working on content review and safety review," Zuckerberg said during the discussion. "Regardless of how much training they have, we're going to make mistakes."

He also talked with Zittrain about ethical questions around ranking items that're shown in people's news feed on Facebook.

"We come in every day and think, 'Hey, we're building a service where we're ranking news feed trying to show people the most relevant content,'" Zuckerberg said. "[We make] an assumption that's backed by data that, in general, people want us to show them the most relevant content. But at some level you could ask the question which is, 'Who gets to decide that ranking news feed or showing relevant ads or any of the other things that we choose to work on are actually in people's interest?'"