THE FACEBOOK DEFECT
Mark Zuckerberg barely even thought of Facebook as a business. The first time I met him, in September 2006, he effused in big-picture terms about what he called Facebook’s “mission”: “Helping people understand the world around them.”
His scope and focus impressed me, so I gave him what I meant as a big compliment. I told him he seemed like a natural CEO. He wrinkled up his face as if I had insulted him. “I never wanted to run a company,” the then 22-year-old replied, even as he admitted that “a business is a good vehicle for getting stuff done.” As I covered his company as a journalist in the months and years that followed, it became clear that doing something meaningful was his highest priority. But as crisis envelops Facebook, the question of its nature as a business is still not completely answered. This is uniquely odd, given the scale of the firm’s success.
A chain of revelations has befallen Facebook since the Observer of London and the New York Times reported on March 17 that data about tens of millions of users had escaped the company’s control in 2014 and was likely exploited by Cambridge Analytica in efforts to push Britons to vote their way out of the E.U. and Americans to elect Donald Trump. (The firm has stated it did not break any laws and neither worked on the Brexit referendum nor used the data in any form during the U.S. presidential election.) Then we learned that all of Facebook’s users have probably had their public data “harvested” by outsiders at some stage because of ill-conceived product designs. Its stock dropped 20% before bouncing back
