Remember when Facebook seemed harmless? Just a place to look up photos of our old school crush and get reminders of birthdays, all while failing to grasp that we were giving away our personal data? These days, Facebook doesn’t seem so benign, although millions of us still use it (my school crush isn’t on there, but I live in hope).
In Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse (Sky Documentaries), one former executive put it this way: “When I first joined, movies were being made; the founder was on the cover of Time magazine; you’re overthrowing dictators. Now, you’re being told you destroyed democracy.”
The film traced Facebook from Zuckerberg’s invention to world domination (now Meta, the company also owns Instagram and WhatsApp) and scandals involving data harvesting, Donald Trump and allegations by a whistleblower (denied by the company) that Meta had knowingly put profits before children’s mental-health. The spread of misinformation is a danger, as illustrated here with a case study on Myanmar.
It is one of those effective films that says nothing new, but pulls together the available information in a coherent manner. It was clearly explained using the example of Trump’s team first selling Make America Great caps on Facebook, then asking the company to put a Trump 2016 ad in front of everybody with similar characteristics to the people who bought the caps.
Zuckerberg is not interviewed, but archive interviews and news footage chronicle the shaping of his image by corporate PRs. When he appeared before Congress, it was requested that the air conditioning be turned up high, so that he didn’t sweat on camera.
Most fascinating was hearing Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2016 digital campaign-manager, discuss how he used Facebook to “get into the brain” of users. In his opinion, the company thought it could take Trump’s advertising dollars and laugh all the way to the bank when he lost the election. “I don’t think they saw what was coming. I did,” he says. Zuckerberg is smart, but he isn’t the only one.
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