Mark Zuckerberg must leave Facebook?

A few weeks ago, after Facebook had revealed that tens of millions of user accounts had been revealed due to a security breach, I started asking people about it. Inside and outside the technology sector: Mark Zuckerberg should continue. in front of Facebook?

I spare you the suspense. Almost everyone said that Zuckerberg was still the ideal man for this job, perhaps the only one. Respondents include people working on Facebook, former company employees, financial analysts, venture capitalists, technology skepticism activists, fervent critics of the company, and more. company and its most dynamic supporters.

According to the consensus, although Zuckerberg – as founder, executive director, president and most powerful shareholder of the social network – assumes a great deal of responsibility for the company's catastrophic events, he only has the level for them. solve.

More than one of his supporters have said that it was even malevolent to fix the problem: Zuckerberg was so indispensable that the only reason he should have asked was if he had to stay at home. the head of the company was the clicks that he would get with this article. However, even his critics objected to the idea that Zuckerberg is leaving his post. Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, an organization that fights against monopoly, explained that Facebook's problems had their origin in its business model and in the legal and regulatory vacuum in which it operated, not in the man who runs the business. business.

Few people can imagine a Facebook without 34-year-old Zuckerberg, underlining how much our large technology companies are no longer held to account. With his momentum and his genius, Zuckerberg has become one of the world's most powerful unelected leaders. Like a mobile oil company or a food company that abuses sugar, Facebook makes decisions that have huge consequences on society and have benefited immensely from the chaos.

However, because of the ownership structure of the social network – in which Zuckerberg's shares have ten times the voting power of ordinary shares – he is almighty and hardly accountable to anyone.

"To be honest, if we remove Mark Zuckerberg and replace him with Mahatma Gandhi, I do not think society will change significantly."

This corresponds to a pattern. Over the past two decades, the largest technology companies have created a system in which leaders experience few personal or financial consequences for their mistakes. The big companies in the technology sector have turned the founders into fixed elements: when their businesses work well, they retain all the credit and when they do not do well, they are the only heroes capable of fixing everything.

There is another way of saying it: for better or for worse, Zuckerberg has become too big to fail.

In the United States, it is not uncommon for senior executives to receive no sanction for the operation of their businesses (for example, Wall Street after the 2008 financial crisis).

Even in Silicon Valley, where founders of companies are considered fantastic unicorns that generate money, business patience has its limits. In the eighties, Apple returned Steve Jobs. Last year, Uber did the same with Travis Kalanick, who was as in tune with his company's culture as Zuckerberg's with his own.

Facebook 's problems have not reached the level of lawlessness observed at Uber, but have had many other consequences. In addition to the leak, Facebook has been involved in the global disintegration of democracy, especially for its role as a bearer of Russian disinformation during the 2016 US presidential election.

United Nations investigators have stated that Facebook is a fundamental part of the genocide in Burma; He has also been associated with violence in India, South Sudan and Sri Lanka. There have been privacy scandals (the most recent of Cambridge Analytica), advertising scandals (discriminatory ads, suspicious settings), several ongoing federal investigations and recognition that Facebook's use may affect your mental health.

Although Zuckerberg has apologized and promised to fix Facebook's problems again and again, the company's solutions also need solutions. Over the past week, reporters have shown that the company's recent decision not to follow up on political ads did not work (Vice News bought ads on Facebook that falsely claimed that "the vice-president President of the United States, Mike Pence, had paid them "and the Islamic State).

So, given these flaws, another question might be: why was no one punished on Facebook? Although notorious defections have occurred – the co-founders of WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus, the companies that bought the social network, have left the country in the last two months – the most loyal leaders of Zuckerberg have accompanied the bad ones, a lot for over a decade.

If Facebook now admits that its problems were caused by a culture that was evolving too fast and was too idealistic, and if it now admitted that its culture had to change, how can we be sure this will happen if most people who the head platform remains the same?

When I asked Facebook about it, the company claimed that things were changing. He has just recruited Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, as director of world affairs – a decision that, according to the company, has brought the serious perspective of a person outside the company.

The social network also put me on the phone with a senior executive who angrily fought for Zuckerberg's leadership, but refused to do so officially. The executive explained that solving Facebook's problems would involve significant costs. For example, the company is hiring more people to review content and may have to slow down some of its more ambitious projects to cope with its impact on the world. The executive argued that Zuckerberg's total domination over Facebook's capital, in addition to the reverence of his employees, allowed him to bear the financial consequences of these changes better than any other leader.

Facebook's share price fell nearly 20% in a single day this summer, after announcing lower revenue growth and increased operating costs. This week, the social network reiterated its warning about slowing growth. A "professional executive director", someone who does not have such an important stake in the company, would be tempted to try to choose the simplest solution, suggested the manager. However, Zuckerberg was free to do the right thing.

Zuckerberg's supporters claimed that he had demonstrated a great ability to understand and solve Facebook's problems. After the company started trading on the stock market in 2012, the price of its shares languished for months as it did not plan to generate revenue with the switch from consumers to mobile devices.

"Mark would say it took him too long to understand the importance of mobile, but when it became obvious, he understood his seriousness and his solution," said Don Graham, a former board member. Facebook administration and former editor of the Washington Post. . "He has changed the direction of this company incredibly fast, in detail, not just with one measure, but with twenty … and if we look at the quarterly figures of the percentage of revenue from the mobile phone sector, we do not could believe what transformed. "

The question on Facebook is now whether Zuckerberg has also designed the solution to his current problems. He said this was his personal challenge for 2018. However, there are signs that his culture remains the same.

See, for example, his promise that a new central hosting device, Portal, unveiled last month, would not collect information about users that could be used in ads. He quickly had to back down because Facebook's data collection system is so widespread that even some of its employees do not seem to understand it.

"I think this has clearly failed in the last two years, and the reason for its failure is that it's not responsible," said Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook employee who is now working in as the strategic director of the Center for Technology. Humana, an activist organization. "Given the context in which shareholders and board members have had more influence, it's hard to imagine that there could be more rapid changes" .

One solution for Facebook could be to give the board more power over the company. Trillium Asset Management, an investment firm, recently issued a shareholder resolution backed by several state funds that would force Zuckerberg to step down as president of Facebook, even though he would still hold a majority of the voting rights in the company. society.

"I think leaving the position of chairman of the board is a very important structural change, so that he's not totally free to make his decisions worthwhile," said Jonas Kron, vice president director of Trillium.

A spokesman for Facebook said the company had not yet taken a stand on the resolution. In the past, Zuckerberg and his allies vetoed similar measures.

What leaves us here: either Zuckerberg corrects Facebook, or nobody will. This is the alternative we are facing, whether we like it or not.

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