SOCIAL – THE PRICE OF TRUTH

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The young Mark Zuckerberg, unpopular with girls. And the not-so-young Mark Zuckerberg, who now finds himself facing very serious accusations: Facebook is not for making friends. Rather, it creates groups of like-minded people. Members receive personalised feeds. To each person, the world appears differently, and that is never a good thing for those with malicious intentions. Facebook is now a colossus that has transformed friendship: we say ‘we’re friends on Facebook’, even written in lower case. It is a colossus, and as is often the case, it seeks to ‘retain’ its customer base. It begins to give members what they desire. What they want to hear. What confirms their beliefs – and if those beliefs aren’t exactly peaceful, so much the better. Hatred creates stronger bonds than love. Someone within Facebook has realised this. The heroine is an employee, Frances Haugen. In 2001, she secretly contacted a journalist at the Wall Street Journal and told him what she had discovered. Zuckerberg’s company is fully aware of the effects of its policies on teenagers; it knows that certain posts portray anorexia as something beautiful and right, whilst others discuss self-harm. The Social – The Price of Truth (note the daft Italian subtitle) recounts all of this, as well as the legal proceedings that followed. From that moment on, Facebook changed its name to Meta, adopting the infinity symbol.