Facebook is out of control. If it were a country it would be North Korea

If the combined might of brands like Unilever and Coca-Cola don't scare Mark Zuckerberg, who can hold the social media platform to account?

There is no power on this earth that is capable of holding Facebook to account. No legislature, no law enforcement agency, no regulator. Congress has failed. The EU has failed. When the Federal Trade Commission fined it a record $5bn for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, its stock price actually went up.

Which is what makes this moment so interesting and, possibly, epochal. If the boycott of Facebook by some of the world's biggest brands - Unilever, Coca-Cola, Starbucks - succeeds, it will be because it has targeted the only thing that Facebook understands: its bottom line. And if it fails, that will be another sort of landmark.