Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2017 challenge: meet people from every state in the US

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg challenges himself every year. For 2017, his challenge is to meet people from every state in the US.

Tech2 News Staff|Jan 04, 2017, 08:32:47 IST

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg challenges himself every year. For 2017, his challenge is to meet people from every state in the US. There are about 30 states left, considering the states that Zuckerberg has already visited. Zuckerberg hopes to understand the different viewpoints across the country, to better run Facebook and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The challenge is a response to what Zuckerberg perceives as an increase in divisiveness caused because of the information age.

Following the surprise win by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, there were allegations that fake news distributed over Facebook helped Trump. Mark Zuckerberg called the idea "‘crazy’" and pointed out that fake news articles would affect both sides in the campaign. Facebook did take steps to tackle the problem of misinformation spreading on the social network.Last year, Zuckerberg challenged himself to build an artificial intelligence custom made for his home. Zuckerberg made such an AI, and named it after the AI assistant of Iron Man, Jarvis. The challenge allowed Zuckerberg to use the tools that Facebook engineers use, as well as get his hands dirty with some hands on coding. The AI assistant is not for public release, and there are no plans to incorporate Jarvis in the technological offerings by Facebook. Apart from building the AI, Zuckerberg had an additional challenge for 2016, to run 365 miles over the course of the year. Zuckerberg had encouraged Facebook users to join him in the challenge.

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