Facebook has had an awful 2018, and a no better 2019 so far. Don't be mistaken, it's all the company's own fault, and maybe specifically that of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. And you'd better believe that tech icons are not shying away from saying as much.
So here are all the people that have publicly criticized Facebook in the recent past, whether it be because of its over addictiveness, its failure to police fake news, it's privacy violations, or some other transgression.
Just a few days ago, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak criticized Facebook, not for the first time, for making money off people's private data. He also advised people to get off the platform if they value their privacy at all.
Brian Acton (L) and Jan Koum (R)
Early in 2018, soon after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Whats-App co-founder Brian Acton urged people to "Delete Facebook". In an interview months later, he admitted as much that he left Facebook over pressure from Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, who wanted to weaken the app's encryption in order to monetise it.
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The other WhatsApp co-founder, Jan Koum, also left the company a few months after his partner. Though he remained cordial publicly during the split, rumours were still circulating he for the same reasons Acton did.
Mike Krieger (L) and Kevin Systrom (R) - Reuters
Instagram's co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left the app late last year. They were also silent on their decision to leave. However, given the timing and previous comments by Acton, it was assumed they had similar grievances with Facebook looking to siphon user data from the app for Facebook.
Reuters
The Apple CEO has also been vocal about his grievances with Facebook. "The idea that someone has built this enormous, detailed profile of you and of everybody in this room and then takes that detailed profile to ... stir the pot, this is offensive to us," he said recently. "We think that it's just wrong to do, and it should not exist."
PBS
Roger McNamee was an early investor in Facebook, and is famous for telling Zuckerberg at the time not to take Yahoo's $1 billion acquisition offer. He considers himself Zuckerberg's mentor, but turned on the company after the 2016 US elections. In fact, McNamee was one of the first to voice his concern about potential election interference to both Zuckerberg and Sandberg, but says they ignored him.
"The people at Facebook live in their own bubble," he wrote in a piece in Time magazine in January this year. "Zuck has always believed that connecting everyone on earth was a mission so important that it justified any action necessary to accomplish it. They respond to nearly every problem with the same approach that created the problem in the first place: more AI, more code, more short-term fixes."
Reuters
The New Zealand Prime Minister is one of the more recent Facebook detractors to emerge. Her beef with the company is regarding its inability to break up the "echo chambers" of racism and fake news on its platform that lead to violent attacks like the mass shooting in Christchurch.
"We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place where they are published," she said.
Reuters
Chris Hughes is one of the most prominent Facebook Insiders to turn on the company. Originally Zuckerberg's roommate in Harvard, he was there when the company was formed, even becoming its spokesman for a while in the early years. Since then however, he's said that the company needs to be broken up for the good of everyone. "Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can," he wrote earlier this year.
"But I'm angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks."
Reuters
You might remember Parker from the movie 'The Social Network', where he was played by Justin Timberlake. He was Facebook's founding president, and a couple of years ago admitted how the platform was literally designed to be addictive. He eventually left the company, and in the years since has regretted his contribution to its success. "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," he's said.
Palihapitiya joined Facebook in 2007 to oversee the company's first growth team, before leaving in 2011. Since then, he's expressed the "tremendous regret" he feels about his involvement with the company. "We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we have created are destroying how society works," he said.
Asana
One of the first engineers at Facebook, Rosenstein is actually credited with conceptualizing and creating Facebook's iconic 'Like' button. Now, years after leaving to set up other ventures, he says he has his assistant block all social media apps on his phone. "It is very common for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences," he's said of Facebook.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee // Reuters
Alarmed at the rising industrial data complex of Facebook, Google and Amazon, among other big internet companies,?Sir Tim Berners-Lee -- the father of the Internet no less -- declared war on these companies, striving to bring data control back to the user who generate it in the first place. Easier said than done, of course.