The Instagram age has given rise to a new class — the “influencers”, who persuade their followers to buy and think in certain ways. But the biggest influencer of the lot is Facebook — the company that owns Instagram, WhatsApp as well as Facebook itself. With 2.7bn users — more than a third of the world’s population — Facebook is a massive, global political force, accused of everything from tipping the 2016 US presidential election to enabling genocide in Myanmar.
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg was once reluctant to acknowledge the company’s political power — initially rejecting the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the 2016 election as