Facebook's fall: From the friendliest face of tech to perceived enemy of democracy
In 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's story was the stuff of Hollywood movies. "The Social Network," about the website and its founder's meteoric rise, starred A-listers Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake, won an Oscar and made almost $250 million in the United States alone.
What a difference eight years makes.
Today, Zuckerberg is seen by many as a wincing megalomaniacal multibillionaire, and the personal data-mining company he created is viewed by some as an existential threat to democracy itself.
"It’s been a sudden thing. These people are not the darlings anymore and it’s been hard for them to adapt," Lincoln Network President Aaron Ginn told Fox News. "So they’ve made a lot of unforced errors."
Ginn, who co-founded the Lincoln Network five years ago to help technology and government work together to promote individual liberty and economic opportunity, added that “there are significant internal company responsibilities that, I think, [Facebook executives] have not lived up to.”
Indeed, in less than a decade, Zuckerberg has managed to enrage leaders on both sides of the aisle in the U.S., and around the world, as his social media network has emerged as a polarizing tool that can be politically weaponized amid concerns about algorithms issues, privacy, misinformation and bias.
The company’s mounting problems and newly-disclosed internal documents prompted a research firm to downgrade its stock to hold from buy last Thursday.
“Facebook has now become part of the broader ‘establishment,’ which doesn't necessarily look out for the regular people, and thus, is now treated with suspicion. Legitimate concerns about the machinations behind the scenes at Facebook have surfaced now, and it is clear that big tech is not promoting individual empowerment, but instead exploiting the masses for profit, power and pushing of ideology,” McCall said.
Fox News' James Rogers contributed to this article.