The rise and fall of the Zuckerberg Empire

Mark Zuckerberg is not the first person in human history to be inspired by August Caesar, the founder of the Roman Empire. But he is one of the few whose lectures of Augustus' reign have a concrete compensation. After all, both men built their international empires before they were 33 years old.

“essentially, through a harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace”- explained to Zuckerberg a journalist of “New Yorker” earlier this year. “How is this explained? To ensure the stability of his empire, Augustus had to do certain things. So does Facebook.

A report published in the New York Times “last week revealed in humiliating detail how far Facebook had gone, to protect its dominance, and to attack critics. As various crises related to hate speech, malinformation and privacy of data deepened, the company's top directors were ignored, and then began to be kept secret, a testimony this was that the platform had become a vector of misinformation campaigns by the government-backed Russian online frauds.

The company undertook an aggressive and lobbying public relations campaign, which included the creation and distribution of posts in the pro-Facebook blog, which was functionally indistinguishable from “the co-ordinated non-authentic content” (that is, the false news) Facebook had promised to eliminate from its platform.

In a particular example, the company hired a political consultant who spread a conspiracy theory, accusing George Soros of financing anti- Facebook protests.

Apparently, Zuckerberg had received the truly harsh <x0sqae of” for the creation of digital hegemony.

At least Augustus was a charismatic leader and obedient ruler. Nobody on Facebook appears in the Times as a visionary as brave. Nor did Joel Kaplan, a leading Facebook lobbyist who encouraged the company to hide the facts about Russian influential activity in the United States, for fear of breaking up with the Republicans.

Nor did Chuck Schumer, who faced one of the top Facebook critics in the Senate, tell him to understand how he can cooperate with the company. (Summer's girl works for Facebook). Neither Cheryl Sandberg, the director who managed the suspicious and hostile response to the crisis. And of course, not even Zuckerberg, who seems to have been constantly missing or clearly uninterested during key meetings about dealing with hate language and Facebook mismanagement.

The demands for the executive director to resign, or at least leave his role as board chairman, have increased, but Zuckerberg has already been controlling 60 percent of the eligible vote shares.

As the “Wall Street Journal” reports, he told the company management earlier this year that Facebook is at war. The problem is that war may already be lost. Wounded by the growing ban, the employee's low morality, the decline in shares, public anger and a bipartisan group of enemies in the current government, the former Facebook times, of an increasingly expanding company, are over.

The company's internal polls give this view: Facebook was once legendary about the immoral devotion of his employees reporting on the company was almost impossible because employees refused to provide information but the employees' confidence in the future of Facebook, as judged by internal surveys reported by the Journal, have dropped by 32 percent over the past year, standing at 52 percent.

Approximately the same number of Facebook employees, thinks the company is making the world a better place, 19 points below in the same period last year, and employees report planning to leave Facebook to new jobs, at a higher rate than in the past.

Scary even for Facebook is the possibility that there are some anecdotic evidence, that it is no longer a required employer for excellent students of informal information and engineering. There is abundant evidence, suggesting that Facebook is losing its appeal to users.

In markets where Facebook is most profitable, its base of users has remained the same as in North America, or is being reduced, as in Europe. The company may be able to assure itself that the Instagram that owns it entirely continues to expand in an impressive way, but the success of the Instagram has not prevented Facebook punishment on the stock market.

Facebook answers European users' figures, not the decline of its image in public, as well as the new aggressive new EU privacy law. But this creates an even more disturbing scenario for Facebook: its continued success depends on a moderate regulatory change, which the governments can no longer expect.

What makes the Times's findings especially dangerous for Zuckerberg's empire is that they arrive at a moment when there is in fact the political will to challenge its dominance. The fall of Facebook may not come after a long decline, but through external action hit by tremendous fines and costly investigations, punished and weakened by a new regulatory regime.

“Can't believe that Facebook can fix itself” -- said Rode Island Senator David Sisillin, who is likely to head the Judiciary Chamber subcommittee on anti-trust issues last week. In the Senate, scepticism to technology giants, it's enough to put together the two sides of politics, and it seems there is room for an agreement on data protection and user privacy.

It is true that some Republican critics seem less concerned about Facebook's overwhelming power than with the conservatives' false claims, that their views are being censored by the platform, but among the republics there is a tangible interest in putting Facebook under control. The action against high-tech companies is a loving theme of Steve Bannon and his arm in the Republican Party, and of course not even President Trump himself, there is any kindness to the company.

Americans themselves have changed their thinking about social media over the past year, and most of them now believe social media harm democracy, and that the government is not doing enough to fix this problem. Public anger, must be much more disturbing for Facebook.

Other technology giants have been able to distance themselves from Facebook-led fraud, since they clearly have useful services. Amazon brings things to your home. Google helps you find things online. Apple sells physical objects. Facebook... helps you get involved in the debate? Does your brain give the political thinking of classmates?

During the past year, I spent a lot of time trying to get myself out of mega-tech platforms, generally with little success. Google research, despite the reservations I have, is still the best way for me to sail the Internet; Amazon is still so appropriate that the thought of leaving it makes me tired.

But I got out of Facebook more than a year ago, and I got back in less than a dozen times since. Control of Facebook logos had been a daily habit, but it had not improved my life. Not many plebes in Rome would have said that about Pax Romana. Some empires fall because of internal invasion or decay. Zuckerberg's may be the first in history to collapse, simply because its citizens closed their accounts on that platform.