Mark Zuckerberg has announced that his annual "personal challenge" for 2019 will be to host a series of public talks about the role of Facebook in society.

The Facebook founder and chief executive said he would "engage more" with debates about the future of technology and "put [him]self out there" more than he had previously been "comfortable with".

The challenge was a contrast with Mr Zuckerberg's 2018 goal of "fixing" Facebook's problems with hate speech, election interference and mindless browsing, in which he acknowledged that the social network had "a lot of work to do".

"There are so many big questions about the world we want to live in and technology's place in it," said Mr Zuckerberg in a post on his personal Facebook page on Tuesday evening. "My challenge for 2019 is to host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society -- the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties.

"This will be intellectually interesting, but there's a personal challenge for me here too... 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 tradeoffs we face, and where we want to go."