For the average person Facebook, or Meta as it’s now known, might already count among these. Yes it remains as a billion-dollar public company and it owns Instagram – where it harvests the human envy and aspiration that was once its own mainstay – and WhatsApp. But the kids are all on TikTok and Facebook lingers on as a sort of phone book for the middle-aged, untended and unloved.
A lot of the blame for this decline has been laid at Mark Zuckerberg’s door. And so Sky’s new documentary on him, Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse feels timely and features an impressive roster of insiders, including Frances Haugen, a whistleblower who revealed Facebook’s weaknesses in moderating content relating to things like drug cartels and vaccine misinformation, and Richard Allan, who was VP of the company in the mid 2000s.
It delves back into the early days, fictionalised in The Social Network, when Zuckerberg, a shiny-faced Harvard nerd came up with a slightly voyeuristic social networking site, which quickly spread like a virus through campuses and then across America. Interestingly, even then, Zuckerberg was seemingly wise to the value of the personal data that Facebook’s burgeoning user base were unthinkingly delivering – he’s quoted as referring to them as “dumb f**ks” for not understanding what they were doing.
And yet publicly he called Facebook “an idealistic and optimistic company” whose mission was to democratise media and connect people across the world. By the late 2000s this goal had succeeded on a grand scale. One seventh of the world’s entire population was using Facebook, the site was thought to have helped the election of Barack Obama (who’s shown here having a cosy meeting with Zuckerberg) and the site’s founder, by then the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, was named Person of the Year by TIME magazine.
And yet despite the apparent humility, a certain god complex, which may have been there all along, crept to the fore. Zuckerberg believed, we are told, tech was an “alternative to politics” and “tech billionaires should be granted maximum freedom to run the world”. Once Sheryl Sandberg, a former exec at Google, came along and began the era of targeted ads, the corporate surveillance of consumers had begun.
Of course, in Mark and Sheryl’s minds they were just helping businesses to hawk the right stuff to the right people. This absurdity is highlighted in a clip when US Senator Dick Durbin questions Zuckerberg at a 2018 hearing – prompted by the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign, harvested the data of millions of Facebook users to psychologically profile voters during the 2016 US election.
Durbin asks Zuckerberg if he’ll reveal the hotel he stayed at last night. Zuckerberg, resembling a fish gasping for air, declines. What about the names of all he’d messaged that week, Durbin asks. “No. I would probably not choose to do that publicly here.” And yet, many senators didn’t challenge Zuckerberg’s prevarications further. The company’s lobbyists considered the whole thing a success, and proper regulation seemed further off than ever.
It’s a bleak note to end on and if the film has a weakness it’s in its failure to even nod at Facebook’s decline. Zuckerberg may have been able to ride out scandals, but even he doesn’t seem to notice a death spiral toward irrelevance.
As we brace for another year of Musk, that might give us hope.
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