On 29 August 2016, five years ago, we were all or almost all a little agitated because he had come to visit us His Majesty Mark Zuckerberg. There was no particular reason: the day before the founder of Spotify Daniel Ek, had married on Lake Como, Mark and his wife Priscilla were present and it seemed like a good opportunity to visit Rome. Rome is usually still half-empty in those days, but the guests had rushed back to the city for the public meeting organized by the University of Confindustria, Luiss. That morning the founder and CEO of Facebook had first gone running around the Colosseum (running was his personal goal of the year); he had met the pope in Santa Marta; and finally the Prime Minister from whom he had received as a gift a copy of Cicero’s treatise on friendship.
Then he showed up in the campus theater in Viale Romania which for the occasion included a fake wall in front of which Zuckerberg – with his usual uniform, jeans, white sneakers and gray short-sleeved T-shirt – would answer the students’ questions. It is interesting to see that meeting again today because soon everything would have changed for Facebook, above all the problems would have begun. It was the Cambridge Analytica summer, but no one could have known it. And in fact the president Emma Marcegaglia, who welcomed the guest together with the executive vice president Luigi Serra, the general manager Giovanni Lo Storto and the rector Massimo Egidi, at the end said: “We are very proud to have hosted Mark Zuckerberg at LUISS, an entrepreneur who our young people consider the most innovative of the 21st century. It was a great honor to have him in our University, a unique opportunity for students who have listened to his story, his entrepreneurial philosophy that has revolutionized not only the world of the web but also the world of work, creating the global start-up model par excellence “.
On stage Zuckerberg was in the nice superhero version that we haven’t seen for a while: “The real reason I came is to find some Pokemon Go” he said, unleashing the laughter of the audience, three hundred students. And he received a lot of applause when, surprisingly, he called that of Aeneas the greatest entrepreneurial story of all time. And many were excited when, praising the reaction of the Italians to the recent earthquake in Amatrice, he said he would donate 500,000 euros to the Red Cross (but in credits to advertise on Facebook, it became known later).
Joking aside, there is a very precise answer that indicates how much everything has changed since then. The question was about Facebook’s responsibilities for hosted content, and the answer was, “We are a technology company, not a media company. We do not produce or modify content. We provide the tools to connect you ». Then came the fake news and everything else.
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