I'd written before about how Facebook's lack of ethics, morals, truthfulness, and accountability simply had no parallel in other FAANG companies. Here's a quote from Amazon's Jeff Besos that throws that difference into sharp relief, from CNBC:
This isn't the first time that Bezos has addresssed the issue of his company's scale with employees. In an earlier all-hands meeting in March, Bezos was asked whether tech companies like Amazon need to be more closely regulated because of their sizable market power and influence.
"It's a fact that we're a large company," Bezos said, according to a recording. "It's reasonable for large institutions of any kind, whether it be companies or governments, to be scrutinized."
[...]
Bezos said at the March employee meeting that the best way to respond to increased scrutiny is to "conduct ourselves in such a way that when we are scrutinized we will pass with flying colors."It's an old-fashioned notion, isn't it?
I'm not trying to paint Jeff Besos, of all fucking people, as anything like a paragon of virtue. His shady HQ2 shenanigans, in particular, are likely to bring a lot of exactly the kind of scrutiny that he's describing. But Besos is willing, if not eager, to be scrutinized, apparently regarding increased scrutiny as being to Amazon what paparazzi are to an aspiring actor: a sign of success. Scrutiny comes with success, and Besos will bear the scrutiny if it means that he's still succeeding.
This is what transparency looks like. This is how you built trust. One must still scrutinize ("Trust, but verify"), but I don't have any fear that Jeff Besos is plotting to undermine democracy in the pursuit of personal enrichment, or of petty revenge.
Zuckerberg, on the other hand, seems to feel that scrutiny, and ethics, and truth, are all burdens for lesser people to bear; that his genius shouldn't have to waste time with such "petty" concerns as truth, and decency, and basic fairness. The result is that I no longer trust Zuck even as far as I can spit.
Doveryai, no proveryai; trust, but verify. Or, in the case of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, watch every fucking thing they do, every single second, because there is no reason whatsoever to trust them.