"Leading itself to disaster: a paranoid Zuckerberg, a confused Facebook"

According to a wired report, the fear of being portrayed as being bribed in favor of the Democratic Party caused Facebook to ignore the warning signs and to allow Pike News and Russian propaganda agents to take over its news item

When Mark Zuckerberg published a manifesto about Facebook's positive influence and how his social network will change the world, he sounds confident - but the last two years have been shaking for him because he has not yet grasped the power he has, claimed Wired.

The article, which appears on the front page of Wired magazine in March with a picture showing Zuckerberg with bruises on his face, gives a glimpse of some of the great challenges Facebook has undergone since 2016, or as Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein put it: "How a confused and defensive social media giant lends herself to disaster, and how Zuckerberg is trying to fix everything. "

"They really thought that the more people used Facebook, the better the world would be, and then they saw in 2016 that it did not have a very good influence on democracy in the US, and perhaps it also had a negative impact on social movements in the world," said Thompson to CBS.

The research, which is based on conversations with 51 Facebook employees in the past and present, presents Zuckerberg as someone who has not understood for a long time how his platform could be abused - and shows how he sobered up. An employee at the company said that the past year had made him "paranoid about how people might exploit his life's work."

The story of Fogelstein and Thompson shows how Facebook's fear of being singled out for the US Democratic Party caused it to ignore the warning signs and allow Pike News and Russian propaganda agents to take over its news feed.

Facebook executives ignored the warnings

It all started when a Facebook employee was caught leaking internal email to a journalist - after Facebook entered his messages in Google's chat service, Jichat. The employee, Benjamin Pirnaou, shared with his friend Michael Noñez, who wrote on the Gizmodo technology site, screenshots of a memorandum Zuckerberg wrote to the employees, and Nuniz wrote a report on the site. After this was discovered, Piraneo and another worker were fired. The two were part of Facebook's Trending Topics team - a service that highlighted real-time topics of interest and presented hand-written abstracts of the articles.

As a result of the layoffs, Noyze continued to look for dirt on Facebook - and had no trouble finding it. In May 2016, he published an article based on conversations with staff members, in which some claimed Facebook regularly buried news of conservative-leaning groups such as Fox News, and favored liberal-language articles. In a few hours, the article became viral, and Facebook suffered fire on its political bias. The alarmed Zuckerberg invited a group of conservative officials to the company headquarters and apologized.
The apology helped, but Facebook was so alarmed that it was perceived as a liberal tool that it did nothing to avoid the wave of News News that swept it toward the US presidential election at the end of 2016. At the beginning of 2016, Facebook's security team noticed the phenomenon of Russian fraudsters Of journalists and public figures in the United States. They reported it to the FBI, but the company said it did not receive a response - and the matter was apparently abandoned.

Throughout the campaign, Facebook executives have ignored warnings about the threat that the social network poses to democracy, among them Roger McNamy, one of Facebook's first investors, who is now fighting the dangers of social media.

Although most of Facebook's senior management supported the Hillary Clinton elections, they were aware that Donald Trump's campaign was using a better platform. According to "Wired," Facebook helped Trump by adapting advertising to people according to their characteristics, rather than by demographic, for example. She recognized characteristics of people who liked Trump's posts or bought Trump hats, and introduced them to contents that spoke to their emotions.

This has helped Trump's campaign, which used simple but outrageous posts such as: "Elections are biased by media that uses misinformation to choose the corrupt Hillary." Such posts dragged hundreds of thousands of likes and shares and the money flowed to Facebook. Clinton's more moderate messages received less resonance.
After Trump's victory in the election, there was panic on Facebook, and senior officials roamed back and forth between Zuckerberg's conference room and Sheryl Sandberg's room, trying to figure out what had happened: "I think Facebook was a bit stunned after the election," Thompson told CNBC. "They did not expect Trump to win and they did not expect to be accused of what happened."

At a press conference two days after the elections, Zuckerberg argued that social media does not affect the decision of people to whom to vote. "The idea that Pike News on Facebook influences elections in some way is insane," he said at the time.

Even in Facebook, Zuckerberg's things were not well received. "We had to confront him," said a former Wired executive. "We realized that if we did not do that, the company would become a leper like Ober." A week later, Zuckerberg had already issued another apologetic statement explaining that Facebook was taking misinformation seriously and had even presented a vague plan to address the problem.

Only six months after the elections, Facebook understood that the social network served as a tool for Russian propaganda. "It was a moment when everyone said, 'Oh shit, it's a matter of national security,'" he told a former senior Wired executive. In a congressional hearing in October 2017, Facebook admitted that between June 2015 and August 2017, 126 million users had been exposed to the awareness of Russian agents who had worked to foment polarization in American society.

Facebook announced that it would increase transparency in its advertising. She set up a special task force to combat Pike News, and later announced that it would make it easier for users to report posts that seemed false to them. In his New Year's post, Zuckerberg announced that his challenge for 2018 would be to fix Facebook.

A month ago he announced a significant change in Facebook's news torch: more posts from friends and family, less business and media outlets. Zuckerberg wrote that he learned from network users that the proliferation of public content overshadowed personal moments. "I predict that the time users will spend on Facebook and how much their involvement will go down," he wrote. "But I also expect that the time users spend on Facebook will be more valuable, and if we do the right thing, I believe it will help the community and businesses in the long run."

Vogelstein and Thompson are optimistic about Zuckerberg's intentions and about Facebook's ability to correct the wrongs. "People who know Zuckerberg say he understood what happened and it's important for him that the company fix the problems," they wrote.