Mark Zuckerberg continued on a trend of public statements regarding Facebook's role in "dividing people," apologizing for the trouble his work may have caused.
CNet points out that Zuckerberg's apology came on Saturday, which was Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. He acknowledges this, explaining that it's a day when Jewish people reflect on the year that's passed and ask forgiveness for their mistakes. He wrote:
It's worth noting that Zuckerberg doesn't explicitly name any recent controversy in particular, but rather goes for a plea for forgiveness for "the ways my work was used to divide people." That's a pretty broad definition, and really, if you're looking for something specific, you can take your pick. Most recently, Facebook's been under the scrutiny of the U.S. government, with a Senate intelligence committee digging into just how Russian interests may have utilized the platform to influence the 2016 election.
On that front, Facebook has complied with many of the committee's requests, including turning over information on the 470 "inauthentic" accounts that created 3,000 political ads that amounted to $100,000 in revenue for the social media network. The AP reports that Joel Kaplan, Facebook's vice president of global policy, announced that they're hiring 1,000 people to vet and check global ads, in the hopes that similar incidents won't happen again. Kaplan also went on to explain in a blog post that while they currently have a policy to remove ads that explicitly encourage violence, they're going to try to do better, "expanding these policies to prevent ads that use even more subtle expressions of violence." When it comes to political ads, Kaplan wrote that they're also going to "require more thorough documentation from advertisers who want to run US federal election-related ads."
The actions outlined by Kaplan line up with what Zuckerberg outlined in a livestream regarding how Facebook is moving forward following the revelation that Facebook had a much more pronounced role in affecting the campaign than originally thought.
In another AP report, it's mentioned that Facebook, Twitter, and Google have also been invited to publicly testify regarding their findings, though no company has yet confirmed that they're taking the invitations.
Related: Mark Zuckerberg Rejected A Proposal For Better Facebook Transparency