The Central Question Behind Facebook: 'What Does Mark Zuckerberg Believe In?'
Last week, Facebook announced the most serious security breach in its history, in which unknown hackers were able to log onto the accounts of nearly 50 million Facebook users.
That breach was just one of several crises plaguing the world's largest social media platform. Free speech issues and the Russian disinformation campaign targeting the 2016 election had already put Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, under scrutiny as the mid-term elections approach.
Journalist Evan Osnos, who wrote about Facebook and Zuckerberg recently for The New Yorker, says the company has come up against "a growing and really serious decline of public trust, both among politicians and among the general public."
Osnos notes that Facebook, which now has 2.2 billion monthly active users, is larger than any country in the world: "It's really closer in terms of scale and reach to a political ideology or a religious faith. ... In literal terms, it now has as many adherents as Christianity."
At the heart of the company is Zuckerberg, who remains something of a mystery — despite the fact that he controls 60 percent of Facebook's voting shares.
"There is this profound question mark around what does Mark Zuckerberg believe in? What does he stand for? What does he care about?" Osnos says. "To an extraordinary degree, Mark Zuckerberg is Facebook ... so if you're going to understand Facebook in any meaningful way, the conversation really has to start with him and end with him."
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
