Zuckerberg gears up for debates on public forums

San Francisco: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said his personal challenge for 2019 will be to "host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society - the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties".

"Every few weeks I'll talk with leaders, experts, and people in our community from different fields and I'll try different formats to keep it interesting. These will all be public, either on my Facebook or Instagram pages or on other media," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

He said the engagements will all be public, "either on my Facebook or Instagram pages or on other media".

Famed analyst Brian Wieser with Pivotal Research warned on Monday that Facebook should brace itself for another tough year as its revenue growth faces risk due to increased scrutiny of the platform's usage by marketers.

Scrutiny of Facebook increased manifold last year since it revealed how a London-based political consultancy, that worked for US President Donald Trump's campaign, improperly got access to data of up to 87 millions users.

In September, Facebook said that a breach had exposed data of 50 million people and then, in December, it reported another security breach where nearly 6.8 million users risked their private photos being exposed to third-party apps.

"But given the importance of what we do, that doesn't cut it anymore. So I'm going to put myself out there more than I've been comfortable with and engage more in some of these debates about the future, the trade-offs we face, and where we want to go," he noted.

User numbers at Facebook were flat in North America and declined slightly in Europe in third-quarter last year.