Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook: A decade of scandal

Ladder Books published The Mark Zuckerberg Story in June 2012. At the time, most people still saw social media as a force for good, whether that meant helping elect Barack Obama US president in 2008 or empowering popular movements to take on autocratic governments in the Arab Spring of 2010–2012. Zuckerberg himself was a hero to young people everywhere who believed Facebook’s mission statement about making the world more open and connected. That is certainly not the case anymore. How times change!

WHEN THE ELON MUSK STORY CAME OUT IN EARLY 2022, the timing could not have been better. Musk had overtaken Jeff Bezos of Amazon to become the richest man in the world. His company Tesla, which was valued at over US$1 trillion, was producing over half a million cars per year. Many of Musk’s most important entrepreneurial ambitions had been realized.

Just because IBC had published a book about Musk did not mean that he was going to stop being his usual hyperactive, provocative and impulsive self. In the brief six months since the Ladder Book came out, Musk has both launched and withdrawn a $44 billion bid for the social media company Twitter; been revealed to have fathered twins with an executive at his company SpaceX in 2021 (bringing his total number of children to nine!); and deployed SpaceX’s satellite internet system Starlink to war-torn Ukraine.

Even if a lot has been going on in Musk’s life, all these recent developments are more of the same—a continuation of what went before. With Mark Zuckerberg, by contrast, the changes since the Ladder Book came out have all been changes for the worse.

You can pinpoint the change in his Fortunes to 2018. That was when PR company Cambridge Analytica was found to have used Facebook to illegally access the data of 87 million the site’s users—data which was then used to target advertisements that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election.

Zuckerberg was summoned before a Senate panel in the United States and Facebook was fined a whopping $5 billion. Rather than being associated with openness and connectedness, Zuckerberg’s company was increasingly associated with data theft, hate speech and political manipulation.

And that was as true for developing as for developed, countries. In 2018, Facebook was found to have played a role in inciting anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka and genocidal violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar. (Currently a group of Rohingya refugees in the UK are suing Facebook for $150 billion for not removing hate speech that contributed to violence against their community.)

In March 2019, when white supremacist Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people and injured 40 more in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, he live-streamed his shooting rampage on Facebook. Although Facebook did its best to take down all copies of the video from the site, the reputational damage was grave.

Unfriended by everybody

Gradually, publicly deleting one’s Facebook account became a popular form of virtue signaling. Prominent Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak deleted their personal and corporate accounts and made sure everyone knew they had done so.

The “enemy inside” took on a new form in September 2021, when Frances Haugen, a product manager who had been employed at Facebook until May that year, turned whistleblower and shared thousands of internal company documents with the media and the authorities in a very methodical way.

According to Haugen, the documents showed that Facebook was well aware that its products were damaging to teenage mental health and fomented violence, but always chose to put its growth and profits ahead of public safety and well-being.

A month after Haugen’s revelations, Facebook announced that it was going to change its company name to Meta. While Zuckerberg insisted that the name change reflected the fact that the metaverse was “the next frontier” of the Internet, most people assumed that he wanted to reduce the prominence of the Facebook name, which was toxic after so many scandals.

Poison Apple

Amazingly, despite all the reputational damage it had suffered, Facebook continued attracting more users and making more money. Eventually, though, that too went into reverse. The turnabout came down to two things. First there was competition from short-form video app TikTok, which quickly established itself as the social media app for younger users. And then Apple implemented a change to its privacy policy. A new operating system released in April 2021 gave iPhone users the chance to opt out of tracking. This meant that Facebook (and other apps) no longer had access to your browsing history, meaning it could not target ads with the same accuracy as before, something that was the basis of its whole business model.

As more people upgraded their iPhone operating system, Facebook was increasingly shut out from its users’ data. On February 3, 2022, almost a year after iOS 14.5 had been released, Facebook warned that Apple’s privacy changes would slice $10 billion off its profits for the year and that that its daily active user base had shrunk for the first time in its history. This caused the company to lose almost $240 billion in value, the largest one-day loss in US corporate history!

But Zuckerberg is a fighter and Facebook is trying to fight back. In a counterattack against TikTok, it launched its own short-form video product and now shows users more posts from accounts they do not follow based on AI recommendations. Unfortunately, this effort backfired when Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, who between them have almost 700 million Instagram followers, begged Facebook to “make Instagram Instagram again.” (Some of the changes were reversed a few days later.)

Will the aliens save us?

Glassdoor, a job search and company review website, publishes annual rankings of Top CEOs and The Best Places to Work, both based entirely on employee feedback. Having been voted the No. 1 CEO in 2013, Zuckerberg had slumped to No. 55 in 2019 and fallen off the list entirely by 2020! Meanwhile, Facebook, after being voted the best company to work in 2011, 2013 and 2018, had plunged to No. 47 by 2022.

Now, instead of admiring Zuckerberg and aspiring to work at his company, young people post videos that mock his social awkwardness and suggest that he is a lizard, an alien or a robot rather than a human being. While this may show just how much Zuckerberg’s personal popularity has fallen over the last 10 years, to optimists it could also suggest that he is just the right person (or extraterrestrial) to lead Facebook on to new success in the virtual world of the metaverse!

The Business of Writing Ladder Books

Tokyo-based Englishman Tom Christian has written several books in IBC’s Ladder Series. The most recent is The Elon Musk Story, which came out in February 2022. What are the challenges and rewards of writing readers about modern- day business titans?

Which books in the Ladder Series have you written?

I’ve done five in total. Four of them are about the biggest names in Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs of Apple, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X. The fifth was about John Lennon.

Does writing about the tech industry have any special challenges?

The biggest issue is the sheer speed of change. For instance, I finished The Elon Musk Story in December 2021. At that point, the Tesla stock price was at well over one thousand dollars, the company itself was worth more than a trillion dollars and the Tesla factory in Shanghai was producing thousands of cars. Now, just six months later, the Tesla stock price has halved, the Shanghai factory is shut because of Covid and Musk is trying to buy Twitter! There have been all sorts of big developments in a very short time. Elon Musk’s story is still very much a work in progress!

What’s the most enjoyable aspect of writing about Silicon Valley?

One thing that’s fun is the way so much information is available online. Elon Musk, in particular, has lived his whole life on the Internet. You can find the videos of all his Tesla product launches, the CNN clip of him taking delivery of a McClaren after selling his first company in the late 1990s, and all his silly and provocative tweets. The primary sources are there for everyone to see. This is less true with the older generation of tech entrepreneurs. When Steve Jobs launched Apple in the mid-1970s, the Internet wasn’t around yet, so there’s much less information—press releases, product launches, interviews, podcasts—easily available.

The other thing that’s fun is trying to paint a balanced picture of the person. There is an awful lot of hero-worshipping of tech entrepreneurs, so you need to hunt down biographies that are more critical of their subject. For example, Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, a book written by Edward Niedermeyer, a very experienced auto journalist, is much more critical of Musk and some of his exaggerated claims about what his cars can do than most other sources.

Do you have any background in business yourself?

Yes, I work in PR and advertising for plenty of Japanese companies from watch makers to trading companies. Recently, I’ve been writing quite a lot of articles for their websites as they try to humanize themselves through corporate storytelling.

What about language education?

I studied Latin and Greek at university then, after graduating, I started learning Japanese in Tokyo while teaching English in the afternoons. I’ve written several quite successful books for learning Japanese, one of which is used at universities in the United States. Reading texts about news and current affairs is always a practical and enjoyable way to learn a language. In that respect, I think the Ladder Series is a fantastic way to learn English.

How would you like to see the Ladder Series used?

I’d like to see the series being used more at schools and universities and inside companies in particular. These stories about real-world entrepreneurs are a good way to get a grasp of business English. Over the next few months, we are hoping to create listening and comprehension tests based around the books which we will put up on IBC’s website as a free learning resource.

Have you got any more books in the pipeline for the series?

I just completed a Q&A about London, my native city, for IBC. It will be published as a bilingual book. In the Ladder Series, I have been asked to write a book on the life of Agatha Christie, the mystery novelist, but I have not started it yet.

Interviewed June 20, 2022