Thursday, December 20, 2018

Why Should Anyone Believe Facebook Anymore?; Wired, December 19, 2018

Fred Vogelstein, Wired;

Why Should Anyone Believe Facebook Anymore?


"Americans are weird about their tycoons. We have a soft spot for success, especially success from people as young as Zuckerberg was when he started Facebook. But we hate it when they become as super-rich and powerful as he is now and seem accountable to no one. We'll tolerate rogues like Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, who once happily admitted to hiring investigators to search Bill Gates' trash. Ellison makes no effort to hide the fact that he's in it for the money and the power. But what people despise more than anything is what we have now with tech companies in Silicon Valley, especially with Facebook: greed falsely wrapped in sanctimony.

Facebook gave the world a great new tool for staying connected. Zuckerberg even pitched it as a better internet—a safe space away from the anonymous trolls lurking everywhere else online. But it’s now rather debatable whether Facebook is really a better internet that is making the world a better place, or just another big powerful corporation out to make as much money as possible. Perhaps the world would be happier with Zuckerberg and Facebook, and the rest of their Silicon Valley brethren, if they stopped pretending to be people and businesses they are not."

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