In just a few hours, Mark Zuckerberg's personal fortune shrank by nearly $ 7 billion. Reason? The worldwide decline of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which even one of the richest people in the world, fall into the list with one position.
Shares of the social media giant fell by about 5%, adding a 15% drop since mid-September. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, this has cost Zuckerberg the fifth position among billionaires. Now, he stands at $ 120.9 billion in sixth place, behind Bill Gates.
The decline of networks, amid a series of complaints
On September 13, The Wall Street Journal published a series of documents in which it revealed that Facebook was "aware" of the problems its products were causing, such as mental health damage to teens from Instagram, misinformation on topics such as Covid-19 etj.
In an interview on the 60 Minutes TV show, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, who also provided the documentation, explained that while she was at the company, she was "alarmed" by the decisions being made and that "profits had been set. before public safety, while people's lives were endangered. "
In the interview, Haugen said she left Facebook earlier this year after getting angry with the company. Before leaving, she had copied a series of internal memoranda and documents.
Haugen later shared thousands of pages of those documents with The Wall Street Journal, which has published the material in parts for the past three weeks. The documents, now known as "Facebook Files," showed that the company did not apply the same moderation policies to VIPs or celebrities.
Also one of The Wall Street Journal reports showed that Facebook's agility favored posts that provoked division and anger among users, and when employees noticed and tried to fix this, they ran into the reluctance of Mark Zuckerberg, who feared if this adjustment took place, the level of interaction on social networks would fall.
Source: Enterpreneur