Bill Cohan, Columnist

Pre-Teen Pornographers and Other Facebook 'Likes'

n a never-ending quest for more and more of the dreaded “likes,” Facebook is manipulating unsuspecting teenagers into becoming walking, talking and clicking billboards for advertisers and marketers.

February 18, 2014 at 6:12 PM UTC

By Bill Cohan

William D. Cohan, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of the forthcoming "The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities," as well as "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and the New York Times best-sellers "House of Cards" and "The Last Tycoons." Cohan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes frequently for the Financial Times, Fortune, the Atlantic and the Washington Post. He worked on Wall Street as a senior mergers and acquisitions banker for 15 years. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. "The Last Tycoons" won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Looking for Baby Scumbag? Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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I have always been deeply troubled by the fact that more than a billion people willingly share, for free, endless amounts of information about themselves and the people they care about with Mark Zuckerberg & Co. over at Facebook, and then allow Zuckerberg to mine that data and sell the relevant bits and pieces to advertisers.

Whether you agree with my take on the inherent inequity of Facebook or not, there's no denying -- for the moment -- the power of Zuckerberg's business plan. These days, thanks to the generosity of all those Facebook users, Zuckerberg is worth $30 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and has increased his wealth so far in 2014 by $5.3 billion, more than any other person in the index.