"This Is Serious": Facebook Begins Its Downward Spiral

Is the end of Facebook approaching?

Behind the scenes of the cosy facade of this platform; which serves for reconnecting with old friends, as well as with mere acquaintances, and catching up with their lives while exhibiting your own at its best by sharing pictures and aphorisms, was always the legendary ruthlessness of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Looking behind the facade, there is the fact that Facebook grew into a network worth over half-a-trillion dollars, and Zuckerberg himself is said to be a "76 billion dollar man". The "happy faces platform" also had to keep the Wall Street happy, argues Nick Bilton and states that:

the only way to feed that beast is to accumulate more, more, more: more clicks, more time spent on the site, more Likes, more people, more connections, more hyper-personalized ads. All of which adds up to more money.

And now, from the "fake news" issue to political manipulations, from security to privacy concerns, there are various legal, social and political issues that Facebook is facing. Bilton himself describes the social platform's key challenge as follows:

Facebook knows us better than we know ourselves, with its algorithms that can predict if we’re going to cheat on our spouse, start looking for a new job, or buy a new water bottle on Amazon in a few weeks. It knows how to send us the exact right number of pop-ups to get our endorphins going, or not show us how many Likes we really have to set off our insecurities. As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.

Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at N.Y.U. Stern School of Business, predicted that out of the "five big tech companies (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook), Facebook is the most at risk of seeing a legal hammer come crashing down on its platform" when interviewing Bilton in 2017.

Zuckerberg himself is aware of the troubles ahead and noted that "his 2018 annual challenge would be fixing his own website". Time will show.