ON Wednesday, in response to a ProPublica report that Facebook enabled advertisers to target users with offensive terms such as "Jew hater", Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, apologised and vowed that the company would adjust its ad-buying tools to prevent similar problems in the future.

As I read her statement, my eyes lingered over one line in particular: "We never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way - and that is on us," she wrote. It was a candid admission that reminded me of a moment in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, after scientist Victor Frankenstein realises that his cobbled-together creature has gone rogue. "I had been the author of unalterable evils and I lived in daily fear lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness," he says.

If I were a Facebook executive, I might feel a Frankensteinian sense of unease these days. The company has been hit with a series of scandals that have bruised its image, enraged its critics and opened up the possibility that in its quest for global dominance, it may have created something it can't fully control.