How Mark Zuckerberg kicked out co-founder Eduardo Saverin from Facebook. Why Zuckerberg decided to attack business pages and what the latest changes to Facebook's ranking algorithm mean

They have reason to think so.

To bookmarks

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo Getty

Since the beginning of 2017, the head Facebook Mark Zuckerberg by US state. He has dinner and chats with local residents, and also visits historical places to get to know the audience of his social network.

While Zuckerberg insists his surprise tour is just for informational purposes, coupled with changes in the entrepreneur's views, it raises questions about whether the social network leader is preparing to launch a political career or is trying to restore Facebook's tarnished reputation.

Rumors about the presidency

Mark Zuckerberg has ambitious goals that he sets for himself every year. In 2013, he decided to meet new people every day. In 2014 - write letters of gratitude daily. In 2015 he opened his own book club and 23 books in a year. In 2016, Zuckerberg ran almost 590 kilometers. In January 2017, his promises took on a different scale: the head of Facebook announced his intention to visit all American states by the end of the year.

Since then, articles about the political ambitions of the entrepreneur began to appear in Western media. , and put forward theories according to which Zuckerberg is thinking about running for the US presidency and is working on his image to do this.

The theory was reinforced by Zuckerberg's open religious views, without which no one is active, cooperation with former presidential campaign managers and a critical attitude towards the current government.

In addition, journalists were alarmed by the recent award of an honorary doctorate by the head of Facebook. Harvard University(he dropped out of Harvard back in 2005). Formally, a person without higher education, but the last leader of the country without a diploma was Harry Truman, who left office in 1953.

From South Carolina to Wisconsin

Mark Zuckerberg says the purpose of his trip to the United States is to see how the people brought together by Facebook really live.

In March, he visited an Episcopal church in South Carolina where nine people were killed in 2015. A month later, Zuckerberg visited Ohio at a rehabilitation meeting for drug addicts who use and (in 2015, 33 thousand people used them in the United States). He's in a juvenile detention center in Indiana and criticized local system re-education. In Alabama, Zuckerberg met with the crew of a shrimp boat. In Mississippi I visited a historical cemetery, in Michigan I discussed Trump’s immigration law with Muslims, in Texas I spoke with priests, and in Dallas I spoke with police officers. In early May, the head of Facebook visited a family farm in Wisconsin: he fed cows, rode a tractor, played with newborn kittens and dined on livestock meat.

By June, Zuckerberg 15 states out of 30 planned.

Mark Zuckerberg drives a tractor for the first time in Wisconsin, May 2017. Photos from personal page on Facebook

For security reasons, each location was given only a few hours' notice of Zuckerberg's arrival. Security and personal photographers travel with the head of Facebook. How The New York Times, Zuckerberg is coming to states that have lost active Democratic representation or the attention of journalists focused on the activities of Donald Trump.

Zuckerberg's journey by Mashable journalist Louis Matsakis. According to her, founder of Facebook visits stereotypical tourist places, the problems of which have already been revealed and repeatedly emphasized, and does not seek to take a fresh look at the country.

According to the journalist, this route is connected with Zuckerberg’s fear of exposing himself to attack, and the possible purpose of his journey is to restore Facebook’s reputation after the last presidential election.

Map of marked states where Zuckerberg has already visited. Click to enlarge image

Connection to the 2016 elections and criticism of the government

Following Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 election, Facebook was bombarded with accusations of indirectly supporting the president. Allegedly because large quantity fake news generated by the algorithms of the social network feed and its section for popular media materials, voters formed a false impression of the candidates, which influenced Trump’s victory.

For distribution false information also Twitter and Google, but the main blow fell on Zuckerberg’s social network. BuzzFeed analysis showed that in the last three months of the presidential campaign, fake political news actually turned out to be more popular on Facebook than real news.

Facebook has been condemned by politicians, including Barack Obama, and general dissatisfaction with Trump has deepened Americans' attitudes toward the social network, which allegedly helped put the Republican in the White House. Zuckerberg initially called the allegations false, but then stepped up the fight against misinformation.

From left to right: Amazon founder, Alphabet executive and Facebook board member meeting with Mike Pence and Donald Trump. Photo Getty

Over the past few years, Zuckerberg has been meeting with executives regularly. various countries. In 2011, he communicated with then US President Barack Obama, in 2012, in Moscow for a meeting with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, in 2014, the importance of Facebook with the Prime Minister of India and the President of Mexico, in 2015 with the President of Brazil, and in the summer of 2016 year the possibility of returning the social network to China and with the head of the Vatican.

Something changed in December 2016. Then Donald Trump held a conference with representatives of major technology companies, including Google, Tesla, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. The meeting was mostly attended by company heads, but Facebook was represented at the event by board member Sheryl Sandberg instead of Zuckerberg.

The journalists were never explained why the head of Facebook did not come to the meeting. And in January 2017, Zuckerberg issued Trump's decree on immigrants. That same month, he became two former presidential campaign managers for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The head of the social network explained that they will be involved in a charitable organization founded by Zuckerberg's wife.

Political career potential

By law, the President of the United States must be at least 35 years old. In November 2020, when the country holds new elections, Zuckerberg will be 36 years old. His current political views are unknown.

Zuckerberg before leaving the Vatican, August 2016. Photo from personal Facebook page

However, journalists made assumptions about Zuckerberg back on January 25, declaring that he was not going to run for president. According to the entrepreneur, he is focused on developing the Facebook user community and working on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative charity project.

However, the Facebook founder may change his mind in the future. Before the start of the 2016 presidential race, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said several times that she did not plan to participate in the elections. In case Zuckerberg is using a similar tactic, Vanity Fair journalist Nick Bilton's main talking point for critics of his presidential campaign is personal data security. Mark Zuckerberg's company has the personal data of more than two billion people, and all of it can be used to his advantage.

Business Insider conducted its own investigation and revealed the details of this story

Business Insider spoke with people who were at the origins of Facebook, with sources close to the company, studied documents and personal correspondence of Zuckerberg, and in its own way told this corporate story, which became the central storyline of the film." Social network".

Ahead of $16 billion IPO Facebook, it became known that the co-founder of the company Eduardo Saverin renounced his US citizenship to save on taxes.

The only reason this is possible is that Saverin no longer works at Facebook. In 2005, he left the company after his partner Mark Zuckerberg eroded his share and removed him from business.

Saverin's exit from Facebook became the central plotline of the film "The Social Network." “Of course, “The Social Network” is just a movie. But it is based on a true story. This is the story,” writes Business Insider. “The story of Saverin’s conflict with Zuckerberg, who, in his opinion, deceived him from a huge share Facebook shares. And the story of how Zuckerberg decided Facebook problem, which could have prevented the company from becoming the Internet giant it is now."

As the publication emphasizes, the narrative is based on the testimony of people who were at the origins of the company, sources close to it, as well as on the basis of correspondence between Zuckerberg and his proxies and the first lawyers.

Eduardo Saverin

How it all began

In late 2003, Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg asked a Harvard student named Eduardo Saverin to deposit $15,000 in a bank account that they could both access. As Mark told him, money is needed to pay for servers to host a site that he wants to develop. The site will be called TheFacebook.com. Eduardo agreed.

Why did Zuckerberg choose Saverin as his first business partner? Zuckerberg himself does not talk about this, but the publication draws some conclusions thanks to instant messages that he wrote at different times.

In one message, Zuckerberg described his new partner, Saverin, as "the head of an investment society." Severin was rich, Zuckerberg suggested, because "apparently insider trading is not illegal in Brazil."

Zuckerberg also partnered with Saverin because he gave the impression that he knew a thing or two about business. Saverin was the kind of guy who wore sharp suits to lectures, and many people, including Zuckerberg, thought he had ties to the Brazilian mafia.

Zuckerberg: Eduardo will pay for my servers.

Friend: There are suckers born every day.

Zuckerberg: He thinks he will make money.

Friend: what do you think?

Zuckerberg: I don't know about business.

Zuckerberg: I'll be satisfied if I do something cool.

So it appears that Zuckerberg was getting closer to Saverin because he had money and an understanding of how to make it work. Zuckerberg himself, meanwhile, wanted to “do something cool.”

So, Saverin’s money was received to pay for the servers, and in February 2004 TheFacebook.com was born. This instantly becomes a sensation at Harvard. Students from other universities immediately demanded an expansion of the site, and Mark and his colleagues granted their request.

By April, the site was so successful that Zuckerberg, Saverin, and a third Harvard sophomore named Dustin Moskowitz founded a limited liability company, The Facebook. Two months later, on June 10, 2004, Harvard officials noted the amazing popularity of thefacebook.com.

It was best moment in relations between co-founders.

Gathering Storm

Six months later, Zuckerberg and Moskowitz moved to Palo Alto, where they decided to continue working on the project in a rented house. Saverin went to New York for an internship at Lehman Brothers.

As can be seen from instant messages During this period, before Zuckerberg left for the West Coast, he asked Saverin to work on three things: “Start a company, get funding, and create a business model.”

Almost immediately after the move, the relationship between the co-founders began to deteriorate.

At first it was just a cultural misunderstanding. One awkward instant message exchange shows how different the lives of Zuckerberg in Palo Alto and Saverin on the East Coast were:

Saverin: so you guys often go to parties and stuff?

Zuckerberg: We don't have fun at all.

Zuckerberg: But that's OK because business is fun.

Saverin: hah, yes, this is entertainment. Although, seriously, nothing fun?

Zuckerberg: That's enough.

But then Saverin did something that really angered Zuckerberg: he launched unauthorized advertisements on Facebook. What’s even worse is that these advertisements were required for a project that Saverin created single-handedly – the employment site Joboozle.

Zuckerberg exploded email:

"You're building Joboozle knowing that at some point Facebook will probably want to make some sort of job search service. What's amazing to me is that you're doing a project that will eventually compete with Facebook, and that's "That's bad in itself. But advertising it on Facebook, even for free, is just vile."

But what finally destroyed the relationship between Saverin and Zuckerberg was Facebook's need for funding.

As TheFacebook.com became more popular, it increasingly needed money to continue growing. Finding investors was not difficult. Already in July famous people Silicon Valley likes Mark Pincus, Ride Hoffman and Peter Thiel are lining up to give Zuckerberg money for development. Things were going so well that Mark soon decided to commit himself to the company and not return to Harvard.

But there was a challenge: getting Saverin to complete the conversion of the company under Delaware law, a critical step in securing financing agreements.

The situation was becoming critical because without external funding, TheFacebook.com could only develop with money from the Zuckerberg family.

Ultimately, Zuckerberg decided to fix the problem by getting rid of Saverin.

In a message to Moskowitz, he explained why:

"He had to start a company, get funding and create a business model. He failed on all three counts... Now that I'm not going back to Harvard, I won't have to worry about getting beaten up by Brazilian thugs."

"Dirty Tricks"

When Zuckerberg and Moskowitz moved to Palo Alto in June 2004, they met Sean Parker, an Internet startup founder best known as the co-founder of Napster. Parker soon joined TheFacebook.com.

Parker's first task was to do what Saverin should have done but didn't: help Facebook raise money. Parker managed to get money for Napster, and he had connections in Silicon Valley. He was quickly able to prove that he was capable, and Zuckerberg only strengthened the idea that Saverin was not valuable to the company.

But there was one problem: How could Zuckerberg remove Facebook's third-largest shareholder and co-founder?

After meeting with Peter Thiel, who would soon become Facebook's first outside investor, Mark and Sean discussed Saverin's problem via instant messages. Zuckerberg hinted at a cool solution based on some of the "dirty tricks" used by Thiel.

According to Parker, Thiel learned these tricks from one of the Valley's legendary venture capitalists, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital (the company that funded Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Zappos and many other big tech companies).

Parker: Peter (Thiel) tried some dirty tricks. It's all very much like Moritz's classics.

Zuckerberg: huh, really?

Parker: Only Moritz does it better.

Zuckerberg: This is pathetic.

Parker: I bet he got it all from Mike.

Zuckerberg: Well, now I took it from him and will try it on Eduardo.

In later emails and instant messages, we see what dirty tricks Zuckerberg intended to use to get funding for TheFacebook.com without waiting for Saverin's signature.

His plan was to reduce Saverin's stake in TheFacebook.com by creating a new company in Delaware instead old company(a limited liability company registered in April in Florida), and then divide the shares in the new company, but so that Saverin gets nothing. Mark discussed this plan with trusted people over instant messaging services several times.

For example:

Confidant: How are you going to get past Eduardo?

Zuckerberg: I'm going to buy an LLC.

Zuckerberg: And give him fewer shares in the company that bought him.

Trustee: I'm not sure the desire to reallocate shares is worth getting involved in a potential lawsuit.

Zuckerberg: No, I'll do it because now I have to run everything with Eduardo, and this way I can get control.

In another letter, Mark writes:

"Eduardo is uncooperative in every way... We must hand over our intellectual property new company and just win the lawsuit... I'm just going to shut him down and then sue him. And he will get something, I’m sure, but he deserves something...”

Zuckerberg pulled the trigger, sending an email to his lawyer asking him to go ahead with the plan.

In this email, Zuckerberg writes about Saverin: "Is there a way to do this without making it so obvious to him that we are diluting his stake to 10%?"

In his response, Zuckerberg's lawyer offers a prescient warning:

"Because Eduardo is the only shareholder whose stake is being diluted, there is a significant risk that he could demand shares, particularly from Dustin and Mark, but also from Sean."

The plan worked

In mid-summer 2004, Zuckerberg's plan to eliminate his partner went ahead without a hitch.

July 29, 2004 new company TheFacebook.com was founded in Delaware. She acquired the old company.

Before the deal, Facebook shares were distributed as follows: Zuckerberg 65%, Saverin 30%, Moskowitz 5%. After the transaction, the shares of the new company were distributed in a new way: Zuckerberg had 40%, Saverin - 24%, Moskowitz - 16% and Thiel - 9%. The remainder, approximately 20%, went into reserve for future employees. From there, a good share of the shares went to Eduardo's replacement, Sean Parker, the new executive director TheFacebook.com.

On October 31, 2004, Saverin signed a shareholder agreement that distributed his 3 million shares of common stock in the new company. In addition, through this agreement, he transferred all related intellectual property and voting rights to Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg became the sole director of Facebook.

On January 7, 2005, Facebook issued 9 million shares of common stock in the new company. He took 3.3 million shares for himself and gave 2 million to Sean Parker and Dustin Moskowitz. This share issue immediately diluted Saverin's stake in the company from approximately 24% to less than 10%.

Mark's plan was a success - Eduardo was eliminated as a partner.

I have never been a philanthropist or populist. What forced him (at least in words) to declare war on sponsors and declare that the social network will be returned to ordinary people?

But no agency will report the news that “our cat gave birth to kittens yesterday,” while for a particular user this may be much more interesting than reports about the war in Zanzibar. Moreover, the lion's share of such “news” turned out to be fake when checked. As a result, the inexperienced user stopped believing any news at all, even the most truthful ones.

Riot on the ship

FB management was thinking about returning to user-friendly policies a couple of years ago, when Facebook announced that the social network would begin to pay more attention to the posts of users’ friends, rather than reprints from the New York Times or Bernie Sanders’ political campaigns.

The last straw, as Wired writes in its gigantic (more than 40 pages!) investigation, was not only the irritation of users at the fact that they were fed news according to the menu approved by the Facebook trending team (a team in manual mode deciding which messages are worthy of publication and which are not).

“ dissident", current or former employees FB).

"Since 2016 Facebook company is experiencing a real civil war. Anyone who doesn’t share Zuckerberg’s anti-Trump views could be shown the door and woken up in the middle of the night,” Wired sources say.

It was the voluntary ranking of posts that caused a loud scandal in December last year. Then one of the users was unable to come to the aid of a dying friend offline, because the Facebook trending team considered his posts too gloomy and did not publish them on the feed. (Why the caring friend did not contact the dying man through any other channel, history is silent, but the logic of Facebook is quite clear: gloomy content scares off the reader, and he hurries to go look at cats on another resource).

During the existence of Facebook, a whole generation of users was born and united into communities, for whom from the very beginning it is not a social network, where the bulk of posts is user-generated content (content created by the users themselves), but an aggregator of other people’s content, the expert points out.

All efforts when creating such services, and Facebook is the first of them, are aimed only at taking the maximum possible amount of time from a person and keeping his attention for as long as possible - Sean Parker, ex-president of Facebook

As Zuckerberg’s former comrade Sean Parker warned, their brainchild works on the principle of a drug dealer: once a user gets hooked on a needle, he won’t go anywhere until his death.

“With the two billion audience that Zuckerberg claims, this ship has tremendous stability. Mass departure of the audience is possible only in one case: if the same massive negative hype arises around Facebook. There is more than enough of this kind of hype now, but it is mainly content producers who are making the noise - that is, media professionals, and this is of no interest to any cat lovers. And it is these latter who make up the critical mass of content consumers,” points out Reedus’ interlocutor.

The Titanics also sink

That even social networks with tens of millions of users are not immune from troubles was shown by the sad story of the once popular My Space, as well as Live Journal, which is better known to the Russian audience. True, the number of LJ/LJ users never even at its peak rose above 40 million, of which over 2.6 million were in the Russian-language segment (data from 2012, on the eve of which a disaster began with this resource).

Moreover, in the case of LiveJournal, its Russian-language version outlived the original American one, not least through the selfless efforts of the now deceased Anton Nosik. But even the genius of the head of the blog service (until 2012) of the SUP company could not bring out of, to use an aviation term, a “stall” project, which at some point “missed” a cardinal change in trend among social network users around the world: a move away from long philosophical written discussions about existence to “clip” consciousness - on which the phenomenon of success of microblogs like Twitter (as well as Instagram) was based. This was a generational change that LiveJournal managers either missed or ignored.

However, the head of FB plans to do exactly what killed Live Journal - return to the concept of the time when many of the current users of his social network were not yet alive. True, this may be a deliberate risk - after all, the FB audience itself is visibly maturing, and the younger audience prefers “updates” on Snapchat and Telegram. However, FB developers in this case keeping their nose to the wind, trying to lure the “renegades” back with the help Instagram service, where almost nothing is required to write at all (an effort that is almost too much for the vast majority of members of Generation Z).

The most popular social network in the world, Facebook, is trying to “return to its roots”: its founder Mark Zuckerberg has officially stated that his project has become “out of hand”, it has been taken over by mass media, SMM and advertising professionals, while regular users with their private problems and joys, they found themselves relegated to secondary roles.

In practical terms, it looks like the owner of a Facebook account, logging into his feed, first sees news from professional media and sponsorship advertising there, and only then - posts from his friends about cats, children's successes and romantic parties.

But no agency will report the news that “our cat gave birth to kittens yesterday,” while for a particular user this may be much more interesting than reports about the war in Zanzibar. Moreover, the lion's share of such “news” was checked. As a result, the inexperienced user stopped believing any news at all, even the most truthful ones.

Still from the film “The Social Network”

Riot on the ship

FB management was thinking about returning to user-friendly politics a couple of years ago, when it was announced that this social network would begin to pay more attention to the posts of users’ friends, rather than reprints from the New York Times or Bernie Sanders’ political campaigns.

The last straw, as Wired writes in its gigantic (more than 40 pages!) investigation, was not only the irritation of users at the fact that they were fed news according to a menu approved by the Facebook trending team (a team that manually decides which messages are worthy publications, which are not).

The decision of the founder of the social network to return to the orthodox concept precipitated a revolt within the company itself, whose employees by the dozens complained to each other that the project, positioning itself as a platform with unlimited freedom of speech, had turned into a totalitarian regime regarding its employees themselves (Wired spoke with 51 such “dissidents” - current or former FB employees).

“Since 2016, Facebook has been experiencing a real civil war. Anyone who doesn’t share Zuckerberg’s anti-Trump views could be shown the door and woken up in the middle of the night,” Wired sources say.

The consequences of this "civil war" for Facebook users will be dual, as happens in any war where there are winners and losers, predicts Andrey Mikhailyuk, research director of the Social Discovery Ventures group of companies.

“The bulk of people who have accounts on Facebook are precisely those users who post cats. For them, advertising and sponsored content are an irritating factor. Another complaint is the sorting of the feed, when the wrong posts that are interesting go to the top to this user, but those that are determined by some of their criteria by the FB machine algorithm. To date, Zuckerberg has not said anything about whether the ranking of posts will be somehow changed so that they appear according to chronology and not some other considerations,” Mikhailiuk told Reedus.

Karin Vainio reported her complaints against FB on Twitter

Seven with a spoon do not wait for one

It was the voluntary ranking of posts that caused a loud scandal in December last year. Then one of the users was unable to come to the aid of a dying friend offline, because the Facebook trending team considered his posts too gloomy and did not publish them on the feed. (Why the caring friend did not contact the dying man through any other channel, history is silent, but the logic of Facebook is quite clear: gloomy content scares off the reader and he rushes to go look at cats on another resource.)

All efforts when creating such services, and Facebook is the first of them, are aimed only at taking the maximum possible amount of time from a person and keeping his attention for as long as possible, Sean Parker, ex-president of Facebook.

This in itself is not a phenomenon at all, since, whether online or offline, content creators everywhere do not exceed 10% of total number population - in full accordance with the saying “One with a fry, seven with a spoon.”

“But in the case of FB, these communities perceive it as huge store brands, and brands can, in turn, receive here feedback, which is impossible in the case of conventional advertising. Accordingly, these 10% will only welcome the return of Facebook to its original function as a communication tool between users, uncluttered by advertising. But the other part will feel uncomfortable at first - but I think it will quickly adjust everything to itself,” believes Mikhailyuk.

The restructuring at FB will have completely different consequences for media and advertising professionals - the very ones whom Zuckerberg somehow blames for “something went wrong” (as if he expected the wolves to fall into the sheepfold , will become vegetarians).

"On this moment Professional content creators have two tools for promoting it. The first of them is beyond the control of Facebook administrators - this is social media marketing (SMM, promotion through social media. - Note "Reedus"). But the second method is to directly purchase impressions using the boost button. And I have a strong feeling that Zuckerberg’s good intentions to give preference to non-commercialized content have precisely the opposite, unpublicized goal - to raise the price of using this button,” says the expert.

People eats

It is extremely unlikely that Zuckerberg announced the changes solely on an emotional outburst or nostalgia for the good old days. But it’s very likely that the company’s analytics team has calculated exactly how many views advertisers and media professionals will lose if they have to rely only on “honest” SMM, and what part of them will therefore be converted into paid impressions.

“It is clear that some of the sponsors will fall off and go to other sites. But it is obvious that Facebook has accumulated a sufficient database of professional users so that its analysts can be confident that the loss of this part will not be critical and will be more than compensated by an increase in direct fees for content promotion. I think Facebook knows exactly what balance they consider optimal,” Mikhailyuk believes.

Moreover, the Zuckerberg empire clearly does not expect that this part of the “offended” will go to competitors - primarily Twitter. Because in “Tweet” everything has also been monetized for a long time and, thus, it will be an exchange of money for soap. And no other channels simply compensate advertisers and “content providers” for the audience they will lose by leaving Facebook.

As Zuckerberg’s former comrade Sean Parker warned, their brainchild works on the principle of a drug dealer: once a user gets hooked on a needle, he won’t go anywhere until his death.

“With the two billion audience that Zuckerberg claims, this ship has tremendous stability. Mass departure of the audience is possible only in one case: if the same massive negative hype arises around Facebook. There is more than enough of this kind of hype now, but it is mainly content producers who are making the noise - that is, media professionals, and this is of no interest to any cat lovers. And it is these latter who make up the critical mass of content consumers,” points out Reedus’ interlocutor.

The Titanics also sink

That even social networks with tens of millions of users are not immune from troubles was shown by the sad story of the once popular MySpace, as well as LiveJournal, which is better known to the Russian audience. True, the number of LiveJournal users never, even at its peak, rose above 40 million, of which over 2.6 million were in the Russian-language segment (data from 2012, on the eve of which a disaster began with this resource).

Moreover, in the case of LiveJournal, its Russian-language version outlived the original American one, not least through the selfless efforts of the now deceased. But even the genius of the head of the blog service (until 2012) of the SUP company could not bring out of, to use an aviation term, a “stall” project, which at some point “missed” a cardinal change in trend among social network users around the world: a move away from long philosophical written discussions about existence to “clip” consciousness - on which the phenomenon of success of microblogs like Twitter (as well as Instagram) was based. This was a generational change that LiveJournal managers either missed or ignored.

The younger generation chooses Snapchat

Nevertheless, the head of FB plans to do exactly what destroyed LiveJournal - return to the concept of the time when many of the current users of his social network were not yet alive. True, this may be a deliberate risk - after all, the FB audience itself is visibly maturing, and the younger audience prefers “updates” on Snapchat and Telegram. However, the FB developers in this case are keeping their nose to the wind, trying to lure the “renegades” back using the Instagram service, where almost nothing is required to write at all (an effort that is almost too much for the vast majority of representatives).

In any case, as far as the Russian-language segment of Facebook is concerned, no disturbances emanating from its head office should greatly alarm Russian advertisers and content creators, Mikhailyuk believes.

“In Russia, the main danger for Facebook users is not internal restructuring in this company, but the constant efforts of Roskomnadzor to block this network under one pretext or another. And I am very afraid that at some point this will happen. But almost every Russian media outlet or brand has initially diversified the promotion of their content: in addition to Facebook, they use the VKontakte and Odnoklassniki platforms. Therefore, the loss of Facebook will not be a disaster for them,” Mikhailyuk predicts.

On May 14, the most famous American programmer celebrates his 33rd birthday. founder and developer of the social network Facebook Mark Zuckerberg. At the age of 26, he was recognized as the youngest billionaire in history and a legendary man known throughout the world. In 2010, David Fincher's film The Social Network was released, based on the biography creator of Facebook. Despite the fact that the biopic was recognized as the picture of the year and received two Oscars and four Golden Globes, Zuckerberg was very dissatisfied with this interpretation of the events of his life and issued a refutation of some of the facts.

The young man initially did not like the idea of making a biopic about him. “I didn’t want anyone to film Mark Zuckerberg while I was alive,” he said. Although he had no desire to see what happened as a result, he did watch the film “The Social Network” and was very upset by the inaccuracies that its creators made.

Mark stated that the film is not based on the real events of his biography and is guilty of exaggeration. So, for example, according to the plot, Zuckerberg decided to create a social network after he broke up with his girlfriend and, wanting to take revenge on her, wanted to earn the recognition of hundreds of other girls. “There were some things that caught my eye. But they were entirely invented by the authors of the film and made it difficult to take the film seriously. They just made up a ton of stuff, which I think is really offensive. They came up with this whole storyline that I somehow decided to create Facebook to attract girls. If all this had been started for the sake of the opposite sex, then Priscilla Chan and I would not have gotten married in the end,” Zuckerberg said.

Mark is portrayed in the film as a cold and calculating young man with a difficult character, capable of betraying friends for his own benefit. He allegedly traded real friends for virtual world and loneliness. In the story, he left his friend and investor Eduardo Saverin with virtually nothing when their views diverged. In fact, Zuckerberg left him a 5% stake in the company, valued today at $1.5 billion, although he was not the main investor.

In addition, Mark can hardly be called a pragmatist: one day he did not come to negotiations with Yahoo simply because it was a day off and he was expecting his girlfriend to visit. Material gain is far from the only goal for him. “They just can't accept that someone can create something just because they enjoy creating... The real story is a lot of hard work. If they actually made a movie [about the creation Zuckerberg Facebook]... it would be a film about me for two hours without a break writing codes", he said.

The founder of the social network also admitted that before watching the film he had never heard of the alcoholic cocktail appletini (martini with apple flavor), but after the premiere this drink really became incredibly popular in the Facebook office.

However, the filmmakers still managed to maintain authenticity in some details of his biography. Thus, Mark recognized the protagonist’s gray T-shirt and slippers as his favorite outfit. He explains his love for simple clothes this way: “I really want to clear my life so that I make as few decisions as possible and focus entirely on Facebook. I'll never get my job done if I waste my energy on something stupid or frivolous."

However, the creators of “The Social Network” did not pursue the goal of absolute authenticity. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin stated: “I don’t want to retell so much as I want to tell a story, which is two big differences. "Social network" - true story, written in a cinematic spirit with thriller elements." Therefore, one should not blame him for adding drama to a film based on real events.