Justin Fox, Columnist

A Facebook Owned by Users Could Solve a Lot

Sure, it's a pipe dream, but look at the mess it's in under shareholder ownership.

March 28, 2018 at 8:20 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

1522265421_GettyImages-936585038 — Photographer: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

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Facebook Inc. is trouble. It's in trouble, too, with politicians in multiple countries now sniffing into its lackadaisical approach toward protecting user privacy and investors knocking $95 billion (about 18 percent) off its market capitalization in the past week and a half. But the company also just seems congenitally inclined to push things too far, to treat its users again and again as otherwise useless ore to be mined to mint advertising dollars. Zeke Faux has a remarkable new story in Bloomberg Businessweek about the opportunities the social network has provided for purveyors of bogus diet pills and credit card scams.1522159216578 After talking to a few of these "affiliate marketers" at a conference in Berlin, he summed up:

The company does make efforts to rein in these scams, but they appear to be under-resourced and more than a little conflicted. Its representatives were so prominent at the affiliate marketers' event that, as Faux put it, "a newcomer could be forgiven for wondering if it was somehow sponsored by Facebook."