This was the year when Big Tech companies were humbled, their reputations tarnished, and their share prices clobbered by a tidal wave of political outrage over misinformation, censorship, and data abuse. This public flogging may go too far.
Facebook's business model has always been simple: acquire as much personal information from users as possible, then find a way to make money off of it. For more than a decade, it proved to be a remarkably successful strategy, bringing to the social platform 2 billion monthly users to friend, feud and play Farmville. But as the year comes to a close, Facebook is facing a pair of major lawsuits in the US and reeling from a string of public relations disasters.
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