Facebook wants to do the right thing — so it's using crowdsourcing to figure out how to do it.
Some Facebook users have been shown a poll which says: "We'd like to do better. Please agree or disagree with the following statement: Facebook is good for the world." The options for answers are "strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree."
Tweet: Whoa
Tweet: This is a screenshot of a survey question my colleague got from Facebook. "Is Facebook good for the world?"
Tweet: This is a thing Facebook is doing now? Asking users whether they agree that it's good for the world? A leading question that doesn't leave a lot of room for nuance. What are they going to use this for?
Facebook's call for feedback comes after the social media giant has faced an array of criticism.
Regulators have probed whether Russian actors manipulated social media to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Investors and former executives have condemned psychological side effects, like addiction, that seem to come alongside new technology.
"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," CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote at the beginning of January, noting he expected 2018 to be "a serious year of self-improvement" when he plans to "study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services."
Some feel that Facebook has quite a bit of reputational damage to overcome. Technology CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said on Thursday that Facebook is "known to be one of the most evil companies in the world."
Speaking with India's CNBC TV 18, Sharma, CEO of Paytm, assailed Facebook's WhatsApp, a new entrant into India's mobile payment space. Sharma is accusing regulators of favoring Facebook's payments system, despite a recent gaffe when Facebook ran afoul of India's net neutrality rules.
While critics are blasting Facebook, users are still piling in by the millions. Usership is up about 14 percent from a year ago, according to Facebook's latest quarterly report.