For years Facebook Inc.’s mission statement has been to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Today Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg tweaked it to steer the social network toward becoming even more social in a “divided” world.

Going forward, Facebook’s new mission will be to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Zuckerberg spoke about Facebook’s new mission today at the company’s first-ever Communities Summit in Chicago, and he said that the new mission statement is part of Facebook’s focus on making the platform better for communities rather than just for individual users.

“For the past decade, we’ve focused on making the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg told an audience of more than 120 group administrators. “We’re not done with that. But I used to think that if we just gave people a voice and helped them connect, that would make the world better by itself. In many ways it has. But our society is still divided. Now I believe we have a responsibility to do even more. It’s not enough to simply connect the world, we must also work to bring the world closer together.”

Zuckerberg said that one way Facebook hopes to accomplish this is through building what he calls “meaningful communities,” which are “groups that upon joining, quickly become the most important part of your social network experience and an important part of your real world support structure.”

One example Zuckerberg gave for this sort of group is a support communities for people with rare diseases. Zuckerberg said that while many people are members of numerous groups on Facebook, they often have only one or two that are actually meaningful, and he wants to change that by helping users build and discover more groups.

Facebook already recommends new groups to users with the help of artificial intelligence, but Zuckerberg said that there have to be more meaningful communities in the first place for the recommendations to work. According to Zuckerberg, building these communities requires strong leaders.

“Great communities have great leaders,” Zuckerberg said. “If we want the world to be filled with communities like the ones you’re all building, we need to give more leaders the power to build communities like you.”

Historically, he added, that wasn’t how groups were set up on Facebook. “Groups have been pretty flat where everyone is a peer — and that makes sense when you’re talking about a family group that doesn’t really have a leader. But it doesn’t make sense when you’re trying to run a group with thousands of people.”

At the summit, Facebook announced several new features that will make its easier for admins to create and manage large groups. This includes access to better group insights and the ability to filter membership requests and purge removed members. Facebook will also allow group admins to schedule posts and create links to like-minded groups.

Photo: Facebook