3/1/2023 0 Comments Social empires facebook![]() ![]() It’s not just that Facebook is a really big social network. of the bottom 65 countries in the world - combined. It’s now worth over half a trillion dollars. ![]() Of every dollar spent buying ads on social media, $0.84 goes to Facebook. Today, nearly three billion people use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and they’re all owned and controlled by the same company. You start a small business and compete on the merits to provide a better product. This is how it’s supposed to work in America. Mark’s hustle in those early years made it possible for Facebook to dominate our rivals like Friendster, MySpace, Tumblr and many others. From our college dorm room, we started a little social network for our friends that exploded in popularity and connected the world. The early days of Facebook tell a classic American story of innovation and entrepreneurship. Americans have the power to right the ship through government action. I haven’t been at the company in over a decade, but I feel a sense of responsibility to account for the damage done. Every week brings new headlines about privacy violations, election interference or mental health concerns. Now, 15 years later, I think Facebook has grown too big and too powerful. Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, says the company is so big and powerful that it threatens our democracy. Watch: A founder of Facebook says it should be broken up. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility. It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade. ![]() The company’s mistakes - the sloppy privacy practices that dropped tens of millions of users’ data into a political consulting firm’s lap the slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and fake news and the unbounded drive to capture ever more of our time and attention - dominate the headlines. Since then, Mark’s personal reputation and the reputation of Facebook have taken a nose-dive. ![]() I hugged his wife, Priscilla, and said goodbye to Mark. When the shadows grew long, I had to head out. We talked politics mostly, a little about Facebook, a bit about our families. We spent an hour or two together while his toddler daughter cruised around. We met at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., office and drove to his house, in a quiet, leafy neighborhood. The last time I saw Mark Zuckerberg was in the summer of 2017, several months before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. ![]()
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