Facebook’s Avarice
One of the least responsible corporations in decades has no right to declare itself a bank
Facebook was founded on a violation of trust. A decade and a half later Zuckerberg’s avarice has metastasized into the Facebook we love to hate:
The Facebook plagued by an absurdly long history of data breaches, related lawsuits, and FTC settlements old and new. The Facebook that violated federal housing discrimination laws. The Facebook that enabled the genocide of the Rohingya. The Facebook that brought you the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The Facebook that knew and covered up the fact that propagandists were weaponizing its platform. The Facebook that creates jobs so bad they give employees PTSD. The same Facebook that makes money hand over fist while chronically dodging its tax liability.
They say power corrupts, but Facebook had problems from the start. The founding story of Facebook begins with a teenage Zuckerberg surreptitiously scraping images from the Harvard intranet to build Facebook’s predecessor Facemash. He went on to settle lawsuits with Aaron Greenspan and the Winklevoss twins over the creation Facebook. He shocked early users in 2007 when the first Facebook advertising tool, Beacon, used data harvested from 3rd parties to target ads. The company may have aged worse than a box of Franzia, but it…
