Facebook troubles an MIT lesson

FACEBOOK executive Sheryl Sandberg didn’t shy away from her company’s ongoing privacy scandal in a commencement speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Instead, she turned it into a lesson about accountability.

Ms Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, repeatedly warned graduates that even technology created with the best intentions can be twisted to do harm, a lesson she said hit close to home, “given some of the issues Facebook has had”.

“At Facebook, we didn’t see all the risks coming, and we didn’t do enough to stop them,” Ms Sandberg said.

“It’s hard when you know you let people down.”

Echoing previous comments from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Ms Sandberg went on to emphasise the importance of taking full responsibility for mistakes.

“When you own your mistakes, you can work hard to correct them, and even harder to prevent the next ones,” she said at the campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Facebook has faced backlash in the wake of a privacy scandal involving British datamining firm Cambridge Analytica. In April, Zuckerberg appeared before Congress to apologise for the site’s role in foreign interference in the 2016 election.