Facebook CEO to become ‘Media Person of the Year’
Mar 09
Facebook‘s chief executive and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has been announced as the Media Person of the Year to be awarded at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June.
The award is presented annually at the festival, which is the world’s largest gathering for international advertising professionals. The anointment of Zuckerberg, 25, represents an acknowledgement of the rapid rise of collaborative information sharing and social networking within the global media landscape.
Cannes Lions’ CEO Philip Thomas praised Zuckerberg’s entrepreneurship and ingenuity, saying:
“Cannes Lions Media Person of the Year is awarded to those who have changed the face of media and communications, usually after a lifetime of achievement.
“For Mark Zuckerberg to have created one of the internet’s most dominant businesses so quickly, and to have had such a global impact on the way we all communicate with each other, is quite simply astonishing.”
The announcement is a welcome piece of good news for Zuckerberg, who has attracted negative publicity in recent days after the flaring up of old disputes relating to Facebook’s origins in 2004.
On Friday, The Business Insider reported the results of an investigation alleging that Zuckerberg hacked into the email accounts of his Harvard associates during a spat with the founders of a rival social network, ConnectU. ConnectU’s founders, also from Harvard, had accused Zuckerberg of appropriating ideas and source code from ConnectU to use on his own site, then called TheFacebook.com.
Zuckerberg allegedly hacked into the accounts of writers of Harvard’s student newspaper Crimson, which was considering publishing a story on the dispute, in order to check whether Crimson was intending to run with it.
Facebook issued a statement saying:
“We’re not going to debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources who seek to rewrite Facebook’s early history or embarrass Mark Zuckerberg with dated allegations.
“The unquestioned fact is that since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago, Mark has led Facebook’s growth from a college website to a global service playing an important role in the lives of over 400 million people.”
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Cyril Washbrook March 9th 2010