Facebook Exec to Facebook Billionaire: you are "low level"

Three years after Facebook bought WhatsApp for $ 19 billion, co-founder of WhatsApp Brian Acton left the company. At the time, he said in a statement that he was leaving to start a non-profit association. "Of course, this decision is difficult," he wrote. In the meantime, however, he seems to have had some time for stew. In an interview with Forbes published on Wednesday, Acton said that he had a different motivation for leaving Facebook: "They represent just a set of business practices, principles and ethics, and policies with which I am not necessarily d & # 39; Agreement, "he added. the day I sold my business. I've sold the privacy of my users to a greater advantage. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with it every day. (His co-founder, Jan Koum, left the company earlier this year, and has since focused its attention on the collection of air-cooled Porsches.) For Facebook, it was too far away. In a long blog article, David Marcus, the head of the company's blockchain group, responded publicly to Acton's allegations, writing, "Call me old-fashioned. But I find that the attack on the people and society that made you a billionaire, and that you have been unprecedented to protect yourself and accommodate you for years, low-end. It's actually a brand new lower class standard.

For Facebook, the stakes of this kind of story are important: the company has retained a supremacy partly thanks to its ability to acquire new toys, to ravage Snapchat, for example by buying and developing features similar to its own. main competitor. Some founders whose products were acquired by Facebook quickly took the defense of the company. "Just for the record, Facebook has always been very supportive of the product tbh team +" tweeted Nikita Bier, the founder of TBH, a Facebook application purchased and quickly closed. "And the depreciation of the product came on my recommendation, not that of someone else." Others have acknowledged the sad reality of an acquisition on Facebook …Mark Trefgarne, who sold LiveRail to Facebook four years ago, said the founders should "get along with the program" when they sell their businesses, and Antonio García Martínez, who made a living criticizing Facebook, tweeted that such an arrangement is a "Faustian agreement." . . Marcus would not have created WhatsApp and Action [sic] could never endure the endless kiss that life in Zuck-land now demands.

It has become a trend for those who have earned millions thanks to Facebook for voting against the Big Tech platform following the 2016 elections, which has raised questions about the misinformation and misuse of user data. Last fall, Facebook's first president, Sean Parker, excoriated the site he helped create, saying, "It literally changes your relationship with society, between you. It probably interferes with productivity in a strange way. God only knows what he is doing to the brains of our children. . . . It's a feedback loop of social validation. . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like me could imagine, because you exploit a vulnerability of human psychology. A month later, the former Facebook VP user growth member Chamath Palihapitiya glommed on Facebook's story as a dangerous tool. "I think we have created tools that tear the social fabric of the functioning of society," he said, adding that he was trying to use Facebook as little as possible and that his children "do not are not allowed to use this shit ".

Their warnings, it seems, have not deterred a generation of start-up owners from setting up in the shadow of Facebook. But if Acton's experience in society, not to mention Krieger and Systrom, resonates in Silicon Valley, it could hurt Facebook's ability to expand its empire by attracting promising newcomers.