And that's not something the "new generation" came up with.

What do you mean new generation? It was Zuckerberg who said “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.” [1]

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2015/02/14/is-sili...

> Facebook has never had principles

"Never" doesn't feel right to me.

I remember being in Sixth Form and then an undergrad while Facebook was in their "web-scale" days: there wasn't (yet) anything untoward being reported (besides the "dumb fucks" quote) - so I like to think that Facebook's principles, then, were more "let's see where this goes" - which isn't much of a principle, I agree - but we were all re-projecting Google's and Apple's story onto Facebook: something along the lines of "they'll make billions of dollars from giving people what they want, how can that possibly be a bad thing?".

So I'd summarize Facebook's then-"principles" as believing in their own naïve optimism about the power of connecting people, but we were all naïve with them - so while it's easy to criticize Facebook now, almost a decade after the corruption started, which of us can point to our own Slashdot or Digg.com comments made prior to ~2012 that predicted this?

People have been calling out platforms for a long time...

For instance the famous "Minitel 2.0" conference by Benjamin Bayart in... 2007 !

https://tube.fdn.fr/w/41d17717-3535-4d2c-8eda-58723fead995 (fr)