Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, And The End Of Silicon Valley's "Wild West"

Allegations (and revelations) regarding Facebook’s controversial role in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections have made the company and its founder–CEO Mark Zuckerberg feel the heat. News and ensuing criticism about Facebook's ineptitude and also disregard for safeguarding users’ privacy has brought unprecedented levels of scrutiny to the company: Has the era of the “Wild West” in Silicon Valley come to an end? In this New Yorker podcast, Evan Osnos joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how Facebook and its top executives are dealing with controversies surrounding the company.  

Osnos has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008, and he is the author of "Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China", which won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction. And Wickenden has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since 1996. She is also the moderator of the weekly podcast on newyorker.com, “The Political and more”. She is the author of “Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West”.

Osnos' profile of Zuckerberg has just been published. In this profile, "Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?", Osnos emphasizes Zuckerberg's competitive nature. The following anecdote is telling:

A few years ago, [Zuckerberg] played Scrabble on a corporate jet with a friend’s daughter, who was in high school at the time. She won. Before they played a second game, he wrote a simple computer program that would look up his letters in the dictionary so that he could choose from all possible words. Zuckerberg’s program had a narrow lead when the flight landed. The girl told me, “During the game in which I was playing the program, everyone around us was taking sides: Team Human and Team Machine.”

Is he showing his ambitious side in protecting the data of Facebook users now? The answer and other things related to Facebook are interesting — as, if it were a country, it would have the largest population on Earth.