Germany’s Der Spiegel has made it something of its bread-and-butter to promote scares with sensationalist cover stories and spooky cover art. But Americans might be especially surprised by the identity of Der Spiegel’s latest big threat: the social-networking site Facebook. Yes, just three weeks after Time magazine named Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as its “person of the year,” Der Spiegel last week also placed Facebook on its cover: namely, in the form of a sort of grinning high-tech monster ensnaring the members of the public in the tentacle-like cables protruding from its metallic body and seemingly throwing some of them to their deaths.
Whether the blue-green eyes of the monster were inspired by Zuckerberg’s own baby blues as featured on the cover of Time, only the Spiegel editors and art director can know for sure. If for Time, Zuckerberg is “the connector,” for Der Spiegel “Facebook & Co.” are rather “The Insatiable Ones” [Die Unersättlichen], accused in the sub-title of doing “billions of dollars of business with private data.”
