Facebook will be "prioritizing meaningful social interactions over passive consumption of content" and "making sure the information you see on Facebook comes from broadly trusted and high-quality sources, in order to counter misinformation and polarization," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company's earnings call for the quarter ended December 31, 2017 (Q4 2017). In regards to the first, Zuckerberg said that the company has already experienced an impact with users spending about 5% less time on Facebook during the December quarter, which he said translates to "reduced time spent on Facebook by an estimated 50 million hours every day." While in regards to countering misinformation, Zuckerberg said: Preventing false news, hate speech, and other abuse is another important area of focus for us. In order to protect the security and integrity of our platform, we're investing in both people and technology. We now have around 14,000 people working across community ops, online ops, and our security efforts. That's almost double where we were a year ago. We've also built new technology to detect suicidal posts that has helped first responders reach more than 100 people who needed help quickly, and we've built AI systems to flag suspicious behavior around elections in real time and remove terrorist content. We've also made progress demoting false news in News Feed, which typically reduces an article's traffic by 80% and destroys the economic incentives that most spammers and troll farms have to generate these false articles in the first place. Financials Facebook posted total…
