People in Silicon Valley say Facebook is hated and broke trust

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Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc. attends the Viva Tech start-up and technology gathering at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on May 24, 2018 in Paris, France. 

A number of people in Silicon Valley hate Facebook and believe the social network’s problems will result in difficulties for everyone else in the tech community, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Friday.

“This company is a rogue in the eyes of a lot of other tech companies,” Cramer said on “Squawk on the Street” on Friday from San Francisco during a swing this week through Silicon Valley. “They say, ‘How do they even have any trust at all?'”

Cramer said people in recent days have told him off the record that Facebook broke the tech community’s trust.

“I’ve been out here, and everybody tells me off the record, they violated our trust,” Cramer said Thursday night on “Mad Money.” “Violation of trust is what brings in the government.”

Facebook did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Cramer, whose charitable trust owns shares of Facebook, has been critical of the platform ever since reports on March 17 that Cambridge Analytica had harvested the data from more than 50 million users of the social network without their permission.

At the time, Cramer said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were notably silent, and said Facebook should hire a special counsel to show it has nothing to hide.

Breaches of data privacy have compromised the personal information of millions of U.S. internet and social media users, prompting lawmakers to doubt that tech firms successfully regulate themselves.

Sandberg, along with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, spoke with lawmakers earlier this month on social media’s role in protecting elections from misinformation and disinformation.