Yet Facebook is like a baby trying to grasp a soapy basketball. The company has no chance of ever fully getting to grips with toxic content given its monetisation model and global scale. How can Facebook monitor the deluge of noxious content in dozens of languages and cultures it does not understand? In Myanmar, and elsewhere, the company stands accused of allowing its services to be used to incite ethnic violence.

The best hope of constraining the company may lie in more imaginative competition and more local networks. Breaking up the Facebook parent might solve nothing if the “baby Facebooks” operated in the same way.

But, as Haugen suggested, it is possible to design a more responsible social network that treats users as co-creators rather than products. Jaron Lanier, the maverick technologist, argues this could be done by giving users more control over the content they produce and a greater financial stake in the game.

If Facebook cannot build a more trustworthy social network then it is a fair bet that someone else will figure out how to do so. A huge market opportunity has opened up to build one that prioritises users rather than advertisers. To invert Silicon Valley speak, Facebook has become a maximum viable product. It is time to invent new, and better, social networks.