It is hard to remember that there was a blissful time, not so long ago, when company chief executives were anonymous creatures who rarely communicated with the outside world and, when they did, it was through the unengaging medium of a corporate press release.

As with many other perfectly good practices, such as working an eight-hour day and going outside for lunch, Silicon Valley has put an end to this. Company statements are often personal homilies and meditations on themselves, their businesses and the world they are imperceptibly improving. Every public statement must contain an epiphany; every earnings announcement, a TED talk.

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the so-called health technology company Theranos, and the subject of the gripping exposé Bad Blood, told graduates that a sign in her office read “Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.” At least she put that into practice. She is said to have fraudulently burned through hundreds of millions of dollars to market a product that did not work. She denies any fraud.

Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, did well with their claim to “organise the world’s information”. The jury remains out on their note to selves “Don’t be evil”. Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs famously said if you want to be liked, don’t be a leader, sell ice-cream. And his product announcements were spectacular theatre.

Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, cannot it seems, be stopped from musing about the meaning of life and the problems with Twitter on every available medium, even his own.

But Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has elevated the personal statement approach to a fine art.

Every time he articulates his plans, it is like reading the nightmarish college application essay of an accomplished sociopath. From the gibberish motivational epithets – “move fast and break things!” – to sweeping statements about human nature and society, his words paint a picture of breathtaking vision, titanic endeavour and constant self-improvement.

Mark Zuckerberg – ‘His words paint a picture of breathtaking vision, titanic endeavour and constant self-improvement.’ Photograph: Gérard Julien/AFP/Getty Images

In fairness, this is somewhat a requirement of the operating environment. To raise funds from private equity and venture capital firms, companies must produce a mission statement that promises benign global dominance but fits on a postage stamp. For many years, in Facebook’s case, its mission statement was “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”.

Last week, Zuckerberg was back with 3,000 words of product information dressed up as profound insight: “As I think about the future of the internet,” he mused in a Facebook post, “I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms. Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.”

Is this the same Mark Zuckerberg who said, in 2010, that privacy was no longer the social norm? And is it the same Mark Zuckerberg who in 2004, sitting in his Harvard dorm, messaged his friend that he could give them the personal information of one of the 4,000 “dumb fucks” who handed over details in order to join his exciting new social network?

Apparently so. The only difference is that previously, when privacy was so desperately old-fashioned, it was a social norm inconveniently blocking Facebook from growing into one of the world’s biggest advertising platforms. Now that it is one of the world’s biggest advertising platforms, it would like to stay that way, and possibly the only way to do so is for Zuckerberg to tell the world they are yearning to step away from the town hall (open) and into the sitting room (private), where their meaningful connections are, well, more meaningful.

What everyone agrees on, though, is that this isn’t a re-evaluation of privacy so much as a corporate defence for a company that potentially faces high costs and regulation to fix its problems. The substance of the statement is that Facebook will push its users towards messaging services and away from the main news feed. These messaging services will be encrypted from end to end (with Facebook deciding where that endpoint is) and posts will be increasingly published more in ephemeral stories, than in permanent posts that can be copied and held against you later.

Facebook’s suite of messaging services: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

What seems to be at stake here is not so much the privacy of users on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, but the profit margins of the company. Firstly, the merging of data between Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram will make it potentially much harder for antitrust authorities to view the companies as separate entities and break them up.

Secondly, the suggestion that communication should be more living room and less town hall is to counter the problem of Facebook-as-publisher, leading to epic problems with content moderation, propaganda campaigns and “fake news”. If the current broadcast model of social networks is pushed into a series of closed rooms it is perhaps easier to control. None of the changes proposed address the overriding issue of what happens to your personal data in terms of how the company uses it to create advertising markets.

The Zuckerberg statement does, however, make me wonder, not for the first time, whether Facebook would be a different entity if it hadn’t hidden its business model behind statements about social change and a global ideology of connectivity.

The fundamental problem is that it has created an expectation of values and mission that at best are misplaced and at worst don’t exist. And yet its main mission, to make money and dominate a global market in advertising, remains unarticulated.

Just as the press is under fire for its hopeless coverage of complex problems such as Brexit and the failure to call out the persistent pathological lying of Donald Trump, we should also examine our own performance and motives in how we reported the ramblings of connectivity messiahs.

The key problem with Facebook’s mission statements is that it doesn’t actually have a mission. Instead, it has created a series of unintended consequences from the too-rapid proliferation of a phenomenally successful ad-targeting platform.

I am reasonably sure there is no bad faith on the part of the connectivity messiahs, often their statements about connection and the value of communication come from a place of basic ignorance or naivety rather than one of deceit.

Next time we are confronted with a company statement in the form of sociological vision, it might be as well to remember the words of Monty Python: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.”