Facebook’s Biggest ‘Problem’: Mark Zuckerberg!

Recently, a former Facebook employee – who provided a large amount of documents to Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal – appeared on “60 Minutes” and publicly revealed his identity. .

Frances Haugen, former product manager of the (now disbanded) Civic Integrity unit of Facebook, says things at Facebook are ” basically worse than anything I’ve seen before “. Her goal, in the future, is to “fix, not harm, Facebook”.

Haugen talks about the list of things she found when she started digging through company documents and researching on Workplace, the company’s kind of internal social network. For example, she talks about how Facebook research shows that people are more likely to engage with content that makes them angry and thereby makes them money.

” Facebook has realized that if it changes its algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they will click on fewer ads, but that means less money for Facebook. “, Haugen told 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley.

However, the worst revelation most people already know: Facebook’s biggest problem is its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg!

” I have a lot of sympathy for Mark ,” Haugen said. And Mark never intended to create a hate platform. But he did allow choices to be made when the side effect of those choices was that hateful, polarizing content would be distributed. more and more reach “.

However, Inc. commented that Haugen may be too lenient with Zuckerberg. He did not ” allow a choice to be made “, he made a choice. Zuckerberg controls Facebook almost entirely. If he believes that something is wrong, he can change and no one can do anything about it. No single shareholder holds more control in a public company than Zuckerberg at Facebook.

Facebook is exactly what Mark Zuckerberg wants. That leads to an important lesson: All ups and downs depend on the leader.

Organizations carry the character and values ​​of their leaders. Never has that happened more than at Facebook. Zuckerberg sees Facebook as an altruistic force for good in the world, and argues that its net benefit far outweighs any problems it creates.

Of course, if you’re building something like Facebook, you have to believe it. No one can get up and go to work every day thinking that what they are building is destroying their personal lives and undermining democracy.

Facebook likes to point out that the problem is not with Facebook, but with the Internet, with the people sharing that content, and that the company is working to combat misinformation, hate, and fake news.

Putting an end to all that horrible content on Facebook’s platform is hard (as Zuckerberg recently admitted). Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, said:

” Every day, our teams must balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. continues to make significant improvements to address the spread of misinformation and harmful content “.

The problem with Facebook’s argument is that, as Frances Haugen points out, Facebook knows exactly how bad its influence is on the world. Sure, helping families stay connected is a good thing, but that comes at a huge cost. Facebook knows exactly how much that costs and has deliberately decided to keep the profit machine running.

Ultimately, Zuckerberg has shown that he’s not objective about the impact of what he’s built on the world.

If Zuckerberg had transferred control of the company he founded from his Harvard dorm room, he would still be surprisingly rich. He’ll still be part of one of Silicon Valley’s most incredible success stories ever. He has become one of the most successful businessmen in the world of all time.

If Zuckerberg is really interested in making Facebook a force for good, then giving up control of one of the world’s largest and most important social networking platforms may not be so difficult.

Source: Inc