Irish Examiner view: Facebook rebrand may not be enough

Whistleblower accuses social media giant of having 'unilateral control over 3bn people'

Senior campaigner Flora Rebello Arduini with a 4-metre-high installation, depicting Mark Zuckerberg surfing on a wave of cash and surrounded by teenagers, outside the Houses of Parliament in London. Picture: Steve Parsons/PA

It’s been another bad week, PR-wise as they say, for one of the world’s mega-companies, whose boss, asserts the latest thorn in their side, has “unilateral control over 3bn people”.

Whether this scope of power of the kind coveted by the likes of Tamburlaine the Great, Ozymandias, and Xerxes is benevolently disposed was the subject of whistleblower Frances Haugen’s visit to a parliamentary hearing in London following her data dump of more than 10,000 confidential documents revealing the manner in which the social media giant carries out its business.