If they were clear, open, and transparent about this, then the article probably doesn't get written.[1] But because they didn't announce what they're doing or t

If they were clear, open, and transparent about this, then the article probably doesn't get written.[1] But because they didn't announce what they're doing or the scope of it, they leave a lot of room for interpretation, and right now a whole lot of people, across the US and the world, are not interpreting Facebook's actions with any sort of benefit of the doubt. That is largely because of Facebook's well documented history. This is why intangible things that don't directly show up on a profit and loss statement- like 'consumer trust'- are so valuable. The difficulty that Facebook faces now is that when you lose trust with key stakeholders- politicians, regulators, the media, etc., it is really hard to get it back. Microsoft did, eventually, but it took ~15 years and two changes of CEO. If Zuckerberg wants to stay the CEO it might prove impossible to build trust, because people have state and it's really hard to reset that state. [1]: One of the things that the Trump administration showed is that American journalists are very good at ferreting out secrets, but if you openly declare that you are doing something, they react with much less interest. But, as the article documents, Facebook has decided to be more controlling of their data, and curate what they release much more carefully. The fiasco where they decided to kill some reporting, then held off for a month on their own reports because it would have shown that Covid vaccine FUD was the most popular article on Facebook is exactly the sort of behavior that journalists salivate over and can make careers. Just releasing the data was a minor irritant every day, but Facebook managed to turn it into a much greater embarrassment that destroyed trust with the media and academics. Even this article, which claims to be sourced to multiple fairly senior executives who disagreed enough to leak this to the NYTimes is a clear sign of the massive problems facing Facebook.