Since it was founded in a college dorm two decades ago, Facebook has never been short of controversy.
Perhaps that’s because its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has never been worried about attracting it.
Even in the early days, when a friend of Zuckerberg asked how he managed to collect thousands of personal emails, pictures and addresses, he replied:
“People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’. Dumb f*cks.”
When he would later be asked more probing questions, this time by members of Congress in Washington, the Zuck’s responses were less curt. But back in California, the attitude was quite different.
An explosive new book on Facebook, “Careless People”, written by a senior insider, alleges that the company worked closely with the Chinese government to try to get permission to operate there.
While in public Facebook told politicians it was not engaging with the Chinese Communist Party, behind closed doors it mulled making concessions on data access and the suspension of accounts critical of the CCP.
Not being in China was seen by Facebook as its single-biggest barrier to growth and it bent over backwards to access the market.
For the past decade, the social media giant has been accustomed to attacks from politicians and the media. But over that time the firm enjoyed rosy relations with other businesses, who placed more and more ad spend with them in exchange for increasingly granular data about its customers.
Now, that relationship is beginning to fray. Criticisms from other members of the private sector are growing and becoming more overt.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the British fintech sector. This week, banking behemoth Revolut renewed its attack on Meta’s fraud policies, blasting that the “current approach is clearly failing”.
That was followed by a strong piece in UKTN by Virraj Jatania, Group CEO of Pockit and Monese, which have three million customers combined.
Under new powers to regulate social media firms given to Ofcom, the watchdog “must hold their feet to the fire if we are to see them crack down properly on online scams,” he wrote.
Not getting social media to fight fraud is seen by fintech as its single-biggest barrier to growth – and who can blame them, given the rate at which it is rising.
If Facebook doesn’t up its game on fraud, the platform will increasingly be seen as a hindrance to business rather than a boon. Meta must make amends, or it will run out of friends.
The post Fintech is Facebook’s latest foe appeared first on UKTN.
