Despite the evidence of its own research and former staff, the company can’t be trusted to stop the harm its products cause
Will we one day think of Facebook the way we now think of cigarettes? Or is the company more akin to the gun lobby? Perhaps the alcohol industry is the closer fit. As we shall see, there’s merit in all three comparisons, given the lethal harm this company is inflicting. Except those parallels actually understate the problem.
For none of them quite gets at the sheer scale and power of this single corporation. That reality was made especially vivid this week, when a six-hour outage confirmed that 3 billion people around the globe have come to depend on Facebook, along with its properties WhatsApp and Instagram, as the place to do business and find out about the world. Facebook might like to pretend that it’s simply a place where friends and family can “connect”, but it’s much bigger than that – and far more dangerous.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist