• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 22, 2017

Facebook has a new mission in life.

Over the next decade, the tech titan now endeavors to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

Until now, Facebook’s stated purpose has been to “make the world more open and connected.”

The change “reflects that we can’t do this ourselves, but only by empowering people to build communities and bring people together,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg explains in a new blog post.

To help people help themselves, Facebook’s product road map is now focused on building “meaningful communities,” according to Zuckerberg.

Presently, only a fraction of the nearly 2 billion people who use Facebook are members of a group that they would call “meaningful.” Zuckerberg puts the number at about 100 million.

To change that, Facebook recently started a project to see if it could get better at suggesting groups that users would find meaningful.

Using its own artificial intelligence, the company increased the number of users finding meaningful communities by 50% over a sixth-month period.

Based on this early success, Zuckerberg said he’s aiming to connect a billion users to a meaningful community.

To encourage more groups, Facebook also launched a number of new tools for group administrators, on Thursday.

New Group Insights offers real-time metrics around growth, engagement and membership, while a new membership request filtering tools lets administrators filter requests based on common categories like gender and location.