A lot of hay has been made over Zuckerberg's "They "trust me" Dumb fucks" comment, but however it gets exaggerated, it shows he understood the power of this information in the very early days... a complete lack of naïveté.
It's also completely possible (and this is my belief) that he eventually drunk his own Kool-Aid and came to genuinely believe that Facebook really was about making the world a better place by connecting people.
Possible is one thing, but there's no chance anyone with a micron of common sense could believe in that marketing tag line.
Facebook was a better, "cleaner looking" social network in an era of MySpaces, that's all.
The user profiling and data collection is the essential part to building audience demographics for better targeting ads, which they needed to compete with Google's PPC domination.
Facebook is little more than a Skinner box, fueled by not cocaine but dopamine.
[1] Source: Mark Zuckerberg will get his Harvard degree after dropping out 12 years ago https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/7/14847968/facebook-mark-zuc...
See https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/facebook-person... for a 2013 view of Facebook near the beginning of this decade.
In 2010 I remember hearing rumor that some of the early investors in Facebook were connected with the CIA. I can't readily verify that, but it fits with everything that I've heard about them.
I don't think that we should assume good intentions here.
No, it's not at all accurate. It's surveillance capitalism, making money with the attention of people, manipulation and violation of privacy on a massive scale, using addictive mechanisms and networks to keep them engaged.
The public is only now recognising how damaging it is to democracy, personal relations and intimacy among other things, but companies like Facebook knew this for a very long time already, it is their business model.