Mark Zuckerberg kicks off Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference on Tuesday. The two-day event, now in its tenth year, is expected to draw more than 4,000 attendees to the San Jose Convention Center in California.
The conference is a chance for Zuckerberg and his executives to wax poetic about all they ways they’re changing the world, while also getting brands excited to sell things on Facebook.
A lot has changed since F8’s first installment. Over the past decade, Facebook has gone from a single website where people play Farmville to a public company that also owns Instagram, Oculus and What’sApp.
Facebook is expected to announce the latest tools for developers and updates for its popular apps like Messenger. But Facebook and Zuckerberg have found themselves at the center of some highly charged debates in recent weeks, and it’s not clear whether those will be addressed at F8.
At last year’s F8, Zuckerberg took a subtle swipe at then-candidate Trump, saying, “Instead of building walls, we can help build bridges.” In the first few months of Trump’s presidency, Zuckerberg has expressed concern about Trump’s executive orders on immigration. COO Sheryl Sandberg has also criticized Trump on his abortion policies.
On the heels of the campaign, Zuckerberg made it his New Year’s resolution to visit people from every state by the end of 2017 — though he did not specifically mention Trump as a factor. The U.S. election also put fake news and its impact on real-life decisionmaking in the spotlight. Zuckerberg initially said it was “crazy” that Facebook could have impacted the election, though later backtracked on his comments.
Meanwhile, Facebook came under sharp criticism this week after a Cleveland man uploaded a video of him murdering Robert Godwin. It took Facebook more than 2 hours to take the video down. “We know we need to do better,” a Facebook executive later said in a blog post after the uproar.