Facebook receives an unfair press?

The headquarters of Menlo Park, which was celebrating its 15th birthday, caused a grunt of resentment.

"We offered you a connected world, why are you so mean to us?" seemed to be the lament.

In an anniversary blog, Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, explained how networks like his gather communities while undermining traditional hierarchies in the media and elsewhere.

Then he says this:

"Some people tend to deplore this change, to overemphasize the negative and even go so far as to say that the change in empowering people, as the Internet and these networks do, is particularly harmful to society and society. democracy. "

In a recent speech describing Facebook's progress in tackling the various harms caused by social media, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was also concerned about media negativity.

She pointed out that one London reporter had explained how much new technology meant we were sharing too much information about ourselves, while one editorial had stated that it meant the immediate end of any private life.

She then revealed that these laments were written 100 years ago, when the technology used was the telephone.

What the two Facebook executives are saying clearly, is that the criticism of their company has gone too far and is perhaps motivated by a mixture of envy and ignorance on the part of old types of media that have always been suspicious of novelty.

By looking at Facebook's coverage by British newspapers in recent years, you can see what they think.

It was ruthlessly negative as the social media giant was held responsible for everything from undermining the elections to encouraging intimidation, divorce and deterring people from adopting domestic animals. Battersea Dogs & # 39; Home.

There is also a somewhat naive belief that if Facebook's technology is so brilliant at targeting ads, it should be simple enough to remove harmful content.

It sounds more like the lamentation of the 1960s that "they can send a man to the moon but they can not solve the cold," or more recently, "they promised us flying cars and we have 140 characters instead".

Social media companies use artificial intelligence and other technologies to identify and remove content breaking the rules. But this is not a miracle solution, the broader challenge is to determine exactly what we, as a society, consider harmful and that we want to see expelled from the Internet.

These are complex questions, but journalists and politicians often describe them in very simplistic terms.

But if Facebook executives can feel hurt by the bad news, they must frankly recover from themselves.

Their business has done a lot of objectively bad things in recent years – mocking the idea that it could tip an election, allowing users' data to be erased by a political consulting firm, thus preventing the flat to serve the promotion of Myanmar genocidal violence.

Other tech giants, from IBM to Microsoft through Apple, have been termed media ghosts over the years, but none of them has had the power Facebook is doing to harm society and democracy.

Running Facebook can now be as challenging as governing a medium-sized country.

But for Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, there is a comfort: the salary is much better.