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Mark Zuckerberg knows that he has before him a daunting task to fix Facebook.
By 2019, the share price of the social network had lost more than a quarter of its value last year. Employee morale is down and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are discussing the opportunity to adopt tighter rules for the virtual world that the network has built for $ 2 billion. of people.
In a New Year's note published last week. Zuckerberg admitted that there was still a lot to do. But the founder of Facebook has pointed out changes such as the employment of 30,000 people for security problems and the investment of billions of dollars in security each year.
The company has also launched new privacy protection options. "We are a very different company from 2016 or even a year," Zuckerberg wrote in a message posted on Facebook on Friday. "We have fundamentally changed our DNA to focus more on preventing damage to all our services, and we routinely ask a large part of our society to work on damage prevention."
But the changes may be insufficient and have arrived. too late, politicians questioning more and more about the size and influence of the company. In the United States, Democrat David Cicilline, future chair of the antitrust subcommittee of the justice committee of the House of Representatives, believes that it is time for the government to step in.
"Facebook and other major technology platforms are unable to regular," he said. "There is evidence of increasing concentration and influence on the market – and increased political power due to the enormous concentration of economic power."
Zuckerberg began in 2018 with the New Year's resolution to repair the company, after discovering misinformation on your platform. He promised to unlock investments to eradicate the Russian "trolls", virtual troublemakers who spread hate speech and false information, "false information".
revealing a mbadive information leak of up to 87 million users to Cambridge Analytica, the data badysis company that worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016.
C & A Was the first of many excuses that the network would have made throughout the year, accused repeatedly of failing to protect his personal information, which prompted users , regulators and politicians around the world to wonder if Zuckerberg – who is also chairman and shareholder of Facebook control – was
In November, parliamentarians from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Latvia, Singapore, France and Belgium. and the United Kingdom has criticized Zuckerberg for refusing to be questioned by an international committee formed in London on "false information" and misinformation.
By the end of the year, the company had been criticized for its path. has faced crises, including hiring a public relations firm to defame critics, such as billionaire philanthropist George Soros.
A former Facebook executive described the year 2018 as the year in which the public discovered that the company had developed. "
" He has infiltrated all areas of society: politics, sports, news, everything. His parents, even his grandparents, are in the game. But no other tool or organization will be so weak about the reality of information processing – and its social implications. "
The germs of Facebook's problems were planted many years before 2018, when business leaders badumed that revenue growth from data collected from users, which would be beneficial to the social network, would also be beneficial to the world.
Zeynep Tufekci, The University of North Carolina and a specialist in the links between technology and society said last year that he had shown the company that its business model of collecting large volumes of data to optimize targeted advertising had "significantly eroded" trust.
] "Because this large volume of data is collected under this type of business model, gaps, leaks, poorly managed sharing arrangements and a feeling of disrespect among ordinary citizens are almost inevitable, "she said.
Regulatory agencies, activists and even officials have long questioned Facebook's view of privacy. Also in 2011, Max Schrems, an Austrian activist for the protection of privacy, complained to the Irish Regulatory Agency about the protection of information regarding nearly two dozen chess in the processing of user data by the company, including the same vulnerability transmit information to Cambridge Analytica.
"Honestly, it was like a year of surprises for anyone who was not paying attention to Facebook before," he said at the end of 2018.
Despite the growing pressure on society, Schrems however, remains skeptical about its ability to implement enough changes to satisfy regulators.
"The question is how to change the culture of a company in a year?", He said. "Until now, culture was like" everything is allowed and all these rules are obsolete and against innovation "".
Facebook's corporate culture is summed up by its initial motto: "Walk fast and break things". But David Kirkpatrick, technology journalist and author of "The Facebook Effect", says that the motivation of the company was primarily a profit.
In a series of interviews following revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Sheryl Sandberg, director of operations for Facebook, said the company had never tried to maximize its profits. But Kirkpatrick insisted that he did – and that this behavior was responsible for the "crisis tsunami."
"They have been too long focused on their extraordinary profitability and on every possible means to better serve the advertisers, who have neglected to spend money on governance fees and prudential controls," he said. Kirkpatrick.
Kate Losse, former Facebook employee and author of "The Kings of the Net", a book on the founding of the company, a time when Zuckerberg and others were building the Facebook platform and the thread of News – how does the space on the user page dedicated to publications flows become known
According to Kate Losse, her obsession with "sharing without conflict" the protections of privacy and information given to users on the users of their data seem to be "unnecessary obstacles".
She added that this year demonstrated that Facebook's interest in growth was not necessarily in its interest. "The competitive momentum of Facebook has led to exaggerating the dose so that they have begun to undermine the company," he said. a past year – and its challenges will only become more complex as it seeks to resolve its reputational problems while countering slower growth.
The former Facebook leader said that the "victims", with a lot of feeling that the media did not give them enough credit for things that were changing.
And an unusual fact for a company under such pressure is that no Facebook executive has relinquished its responsibilities. In November, Sheryl Sandberg was put in the spotlight after the New York Times investigation that revealed that the company had hired Definers, a Republican trendsetter, who had tried to slander activist groups in the company. Opposition by linking them to Soros, who is often at the center of the right-wing conspiracy theories.
Sheryl Sandberg, who oversees political and public relations on the social network, denied having ordered the investigation, but Facebook later confessed that she had asked questions about the fact that Soros was selling stock of the society.
For Kirkpatrick, without extreme pressure from Wall Street or the board of directors. Facebook, it would be unlikely that Zuckerberg dismiss Sheryl Sandberg. "He relies heavily on Sheryl for his many administrative and public relations affairs," he added. "He trusts her too much."
In recent months, Facebook's huge spending power has allowed it to spend a lot of money trying to solve its problems, including doubling the number of human moderators used to examine the content of dozens de
But its financial flexibility could become more limited as investors worry about the slowdown in growth. The company lost $ 120 billion of its market capitalization in a July day only, when it warned of slowing revenue growth and stagnant user numbers in developed markets .
However, Brian Wieser, badyst at Pivotal Research, most shareholders do not share the concerns of civil society groups – the company's shares reached their highest level in July, just when the scandal of Cambridge Analytica unveiled – and when the company
If you do not reach your goals, Facebook might feel the need to divert resources to satisfy its shareholders – and accelerate them, instead of taking a break, his quest growth.
"Nothing that is dear to the affairs of civil society," he said. "It will be a rise or fall in income over expectations … and stocks will move because of that."
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