Aside: Interesting use of the pronoun 'she' in this comment. FB's behaviour is totally due to Zuck, as he owns 53.3% of the voting shares of the company. FB is Zuck, for all intents and purposes.
I see this use of 'she' from time to time and also curious about motivation here. Also, I'd say even though Zuck is practically face of facebook (heh), company is still genderless and should be referred to as it. In my opinion, of course.
My usual assumption is that the speaker’s first language uses the feminine pronoun for companies. Outside of English, I certainly have the reverse problem of using “it” for all inanimate objects even when they should be “he/she” according to the language’s rules.
In languages with grammatical gender you certainly don't use "it" (neuter gender) for words that have different gender.
Interestingly, in both Russian and Spanish "company" has feminine grammatical gender. Also in German (one of the words).
To really get off-topic: The use of 'she' is likely in immitation of the female-gender pronouns that are used to refer to ships and other watercraft or like nation-states, as is common in English. Likening FB to a large ship or country is not unreasonable in terms of how big corporations can be, and I think it may be applicable to larger firms like GE, Ford, Shell, etc that do not have majority voting control by one person. However, as FB is totally controlled by Zuck (an edge case in public companies,for sure), I think that refering to FB like a large ship or micro-state is not apt.
As a native English speaker, I have always been irritated by that usage (which I’ll be the first to admit is not really rational) and I’m pleased that it seems to be dying out.
I think it irritates me for the same reason I get irritated by American English speakers calling soccer “football”, or by people using a dieresis when writing “coördinate”.
Basically, it’s rare enough that it doesn’t sound natural and therefore comes off to me as an affectation, and makes the person sound weirdly smug about being “technically correct”.
I really should get over it, but like I said, not really rational.
Totally going off-topic, but for others like me who love these poetic phrases, they're called "terms of venery", dating back to the late middle ages' hunting tradition [0].
In the list I see "coalition of cheetahs" and "kindle of kittens". But then again, I don't mind new coinages, these are fun.
Well, afaik English used to have 3 genders for nouns, and it died out everywhere but for third person pronouns.
There are some languages that don't have gender for pronouns, even.
Or some languages that have 2 genders for most things but 3 genders for pronouns (eg. Spanish distinguishes between este and esto because Latin distinguished between iste and istud, but most masculine/neuter contrasts of -us vs. -um did not survive their final consonants no longer being pronounced. Whether or not a language retains such a distinction can appear highly coincidental in the face of such seemingly unrelated phonetic changes.)