> It is clear that WW has no relevance just as Zuckerberg to science.

> Also, comparing one of the most respected human minds of all time to a simply grotesquely powerful active living person this way is something that is very distasteful from a news publication.

A more generous interpretation could be that on social networks, emergent properties are hard to predict beforehand with theory, and require observation of the actual phenomenon. That's actually behind a large body of scientific work, the best known being agent-based models.

Also I think it's biased to simpy discard the scientific contribution of FANGs with emotionally loaded words like "grotesquely": from algorithms to new methods, there's much good to be found in what large companies (that you may like or dislike) have done.