[ModernMech]

I dunno if it’s exclusively his innovation, but Zuckerberg’s insight was that you could actually lie to your users by presenting yourself as trustworthy, while having malicious intent to violate their privacy by selling their data to advertisers, and there are no business repercussions for doing so.

[vitally3643]

That's literally just a con. People have been doing this since the dawn of history. The only unique bit is the sheer scale it's happening at now

[4fffsa]

Zuckerberg influenced people to hand over their personal data.

His team then enabled lots of people to become influencers. Those influencers influence their followers to buy products (aka generate ad-revenue).

And that is the pure essence of the business model.