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The Decline and Fall of the Zuckerberg Empire | Max Read

Do we need Facebook?

nymag.com|Max Read

Facebook was once legendary for the cultish dedication of its employees — reporting on the company was nearly impossible because workers refused to leak — but employee confidence in Facebook’s future, as judged by internal surveys reported on by the Journal, is down 32 percentage points over the past year, to 52 percent. Around the same number of Facebook employees think the company is making the world a better place, down 19 points from this time last year, and employees report that they plan to leave Facebook for new jobs earlier than they had in the past. Scarier even for Facebook is the possibility, for which there is some anecdotal evidence, that it’s no longer a sought-after employer for top computer-science and engineering graduates.

There’s already ample evidence that Facebook is losing its hold on users. In the markets where Facebook is most profitable, its user base is either stagnant, as in North America, or actually shrinking, as in Europe. The company might be able to reassure itself that Instagram — which it wholly owns — is still expanding impressively, but the success of Instagram hasn’t stopped Facebook from getting punished on the stock market.

Facebook blames its attenuating European-user figures not on its faltering public image but on the European Union’s aggressive new privacy law, GDPR. But this raises a more troubling possibility for Facebook: that its continued success is dependent on a soft regulatory touch it can no longer expect from governments. What makes the Times revelations particularly dangerous to Zuckerberg’s empire is that they arrive at a moment when there is actually the political will to challenge its dominance. The fall of Facebook may not come after a long decline but through outside action — slapped with major fines and expensive investigations, chastened and disempowered by a new regulatory regime. “Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate itself,” Rhode Island representative David Cicilline — who will likely run the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust issues — tweeted last week.

"Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff," he says, "you are not moving fast enough.", Zuckerberg's prime directive to his developers and team.