Facebook is the business that doesn’t listen. In common with many tech companies it has never much cared for the opinions of others, certainly not the press.
It has always been certain that it is a force for good, that it had no need to explain itself. Newspapers, well, they were just bitter at the readers they had lost to the internet.
All of the nasty, abusive stuff doing the rounds on its own website weren’t its problem. Like most tech giants, it would insist that it wasn’t a publisher of anything, could not be held accountable for what others posted.
This position was never going to hold. At some point, it was always going to have to police itself, or find itself policed.
The PR problems it presently has could nearly all have been avoided if it had bothered to engage before it was forced to do so. It needed to hire serious flaks with the nerve to tell the CEO he was wrong.
It didn’t because it thought it was infallible.
In UK businesses, you see this attitude in individuals, but rarely in entire companies.
Because it didn’t do any proper PR, Facebook is going to end up paying more tax, and facing more lawsuits over privacy violations that it would had it just been sensible.
As its reputation continues to be battered, as users grow ever more wary of what this company does with their data, perhaps it will find they desert it altogether.
Facebook deserves all of this, and more.
