From Newsmax

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is poised to lose at least $15 billion in a year he was constantly haunted by controversies.

Zuckerberg’s net worth started at around $75 billion on January 2, Time reported. His $15 billion setback would be the deepest among the any of the other 499richest people in the world.

The Facebook founder’s 13% stake in the company makes up almost all of his fortune, Time explained. Accusations of the platform’s role in Russian election interference and the mass genocide in Rohingya put a closer eye on Facebook, and the unraveling revelations of data breaches and unsavory practices at the executive level that followed led to a number of stock price drops.

Zuckerberg, 34, who recently was the world’s third-richest person, behind Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, is now ranked sixth on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bloomberg reported.

Late last month, Zuckerberg defended his response to Russian election meddling on the world’s largest social media network and issued a new plan aimed at stifling misbehavior while maintaining a vibrant hub for online speech, Reuters reported.

His comments in a conference call with journalists and in a Facebook post followed a recent New York Times report that contended that he and other executives tried to deflect criticism internally and in Congress about Russian propaganda spreading through Facebook during the last three years.

Many U.S. lawmakers said after the report that the government must regulate or investigate Facebook, which has become a daily source of information for more than 2 billion people globally.

Zuckerberg said that he has acted swiftly to combat the Russian challenge and supports regulation that would encourage companies to reduce the prevalence of “harmful content.”

He announced several self-regulatory measures, including rough plans to create an independent body by the end of 2019 to review appeals from users who contend their content was wrongly banned. Users also would get a new choice on whether they want to view “borderline content” in their news feeds, he said.

“I’ve increasingly come to believe that Facebook should not make so many important decisions about free expression and safety on our own,” Zuckerberg wrote.

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