Vanity Fair: “This Could Be the End of Facebook”

It’s worth recalling, of course, that it wasn’t the makers of Tylenol who put cyanide in the pills that killed seven innocent people; nevertheless, the company felt a responsibility to come up with a solution to the problem. While Facebook’s engineers may not be posting fake news, the dirt is still on their hands. The damage done to organizations in crises isn’t the crisis itself— it’s how you handle the crisis, Scott Galloway, author of the new book The Four: The Hidden D.N.A. of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, told me this week on the latest episode of the Inside the Hive podcast. There’s only one thing you have to remember: you have to overcorrect. You have to clear every shelf of all Tylenol nationwide. You can’t say this is an isolated incident and it won’t happen again.

Nick Bilton

It may not be the end of Facebook – the company has weathered many crises on its way to the top – but increased government scrutiny, and possibly regulation, is the last thing a rising tech giant wants. I expect Facebook to rapidly adapt to the new environment; but in the long run the resources spent on compliance may reduce its competitiveness, allowing other companies to step up and challenge its dominance in the social media space – as it happened with Microsoft after their antitrust investigation.

FACEBOOK timeline:
- didn’t happen
- happened, but was small
- ok, semi-big
- ok, it reached 126 million, but no evidence it influenced them https://t.co/U84JdHjvF5

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) October 30, 2017

Scott Galloway on the latest episode of the Inside the Hive podcast