Mark Zuckerberg, social media genius, questioned by the influence of Facebook

At 37, he is the eighth person with the most money in the world, according to ForbesThanks to Facebook, the social network he created 17 years ago and which continues to be the one with the most users globally.

However, as time goes by, Mark Zuckerberg has to respond to more questions and legal complaints about his platform and the influence it can have in different circumstances.

This week the so-called Facebook Papers (Facebook papers) were published, a leak that ensures that the company puts its profits before the security and veracity of the information. This is something that Zuckerberg has again denied.

A former Facebook engineer, Frances Haugen, said the social media giant was aware of the harmful effects its services had on some of the teens who use them, according to her own internal research. However, in the technology company they say that she did not handle information that supposedly would show this.

“Good faith reviews help us to improve, but my opinion is that we are seeing a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false image of our company (…). The reality is that we have an open culture that encourages discussion and research about our work so that we can move forward on many complex issues that are not specific to us, ”Zuckerberg said in his defense.

María Dolores Brito, a professor at the San Francisco de Quito University and an expert in digital behavior, recalls that this network was born in a university context, created by Zuckerberg in 2004 to connect students. Then it grew due to the simplicity of its dynamics and interaction, superior to other networks that dominated at that time, such as MySpace or Hi5 (at the end of the 2000s).

The social network grew to reach more than 2,900 million users, which still maintains it as the queen of these platforms.

By the second decade of this millennium, Zuckerberg was the new leader in technology that allowed interaction between geographically separated people. But 17 years later, the company faces perhaps its biggest crisis, now that 17 news organizations in the United States publish more documents about its problems, including difficulties in regulating hate and disinformation messages and continuous subpoenas to the parliaments of the United States. United States and United Kingdom; in addition to being the target, along with other technology companies, such as Google or Amazon, of laws to limit their economic power and influence, especially in Europe.

Thus, the director and owner of Facebook has gone to various hearings to face accusations that include doing little to stop the influence that messages of hate or radicalism can have. He is also accused by legislators and opinion leaders of not doing enough to prevent the proliferation of publications by authors or sites seeking to misinform.

Already in 2018 Facebook also experienced a great crisis when it was published that the company Cambridge Analytica -remember BBC – had used a personality test on the social network that led to accusations of data theft, political interference and blackmail with prostitutes. The data was later used to psychologically manipulate voters in the 2016 US election, in which Donald Trump won the presidential election. The company apologized and even lost money.

Sometimes the use of algorithms that end up locking the user in a bubble on the Internet has been criticized when determining what they see, taking into reference the things that they like the most or that they support so that they interact. Something that encourages polarization and other content that could be considered toxic, according to former employees of the firm.

However, in a scenario that faces periodic public relations problems, only in the third quarter of 2021, Facebook reported profits of more than 9,000 million dollars, 17% more than the previous year. Additionally, according to CNN, people who use any of the company’s applications (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) have increased to more than 6.1 billion, according to data from the 2021 Hootsuite report.

The only thing that could, so far, make a dent in its power, according to experts, is that with the advancement of technology, issues such as the new Apple monitoring rules appear, which warns and requests permission from the users of their devices so that the app tracks your behavior and uses your personal data to serve it to advertisers. Facebook has already said that this type of action could affect its business model, decreasing the precision of the orientation of the ads, higher costs for advertisers and more complexity to measure results, according to the company’s own director of operations, Sheryl Sandberg. .

For Brito, in the end, it is important to combine the controls and regulations of the platform, which already does them on issues such as information about COVID-19, with greater responsibility of users in the use of these networks and the information that is uploaded to them.

But not everything is negative, since in the search for new services Facebook will invest more in Facebook Reality Labs, to give greater impetus to virtual and augmented reality, something that has already interested many investors.

“I’m excited about our roadmap, especially around creators, commerce, and helping build the metaverse,” Zuckerberg said of this. (I)