Facebook founder’s convenient apologies
In a lyrically plaintive tone, in one of his minor hit songs from 1976, pop crooner Elton John lamented that “Sorry seems to be the hardest word.” That certainly wasn’t the tune being sung by Facebook’s founder in Washington, D.C., this week; if anything, “sorry” was the easiest response for Mark Zuckerberg to muster, again and again and again, during two days of testimony before U.S. congressional committees concerned about the unauthorized acquisition of 87 million Facebook users’ personal data by a British political consulting firm.
Zuckerberg, who has famously avoided being questioned in public about Facebook’s activities and mechanisms for most of the social-media site’s 14-year existence, agreed to sit before the joint Senate committee hearing after controversy surrounding the unauthorized “scraping” of users’ information by the data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica was exposed by former staffer turned whistleblower Christopher Wylie.
The data was reportedly used to craft online material aimed at influencing users’ opinions and behaviour related to, among other things, Britain’s “Brexit” vote and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In the aftermath of Wylie’s revelations, Facebook faced severe criticism and its market share value - which has topped half a trillion dollars - declined by more than US$60 billion.
The pressure on Facebook grew sufficiently intense that its founder agreed to this week’s rare public questioning.
Zuckerberg was well prepared for his congressional testimony and was mostly able to stick to his talking points, while defending - but not necessarily explaining - his business model and peppering his responses with a generous measure of seemingly sincere apology.
“I started Facebook, I run it and I’m responsible for what happens here,” was a refrain repeated several times by the 33-year-old multibillionaire.
He was caught somewhat off guard, however, when Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin asked Zuckerberg if he’d be willing to name the hotel he was staying at while in Washington, or if he’d care to share the names of people he had messaged online in the past week.
“No,” was Zuckerberg’s predictable response to both queries.
“I think maybe this is what this is all about: your right to privacy,” Durbin said. “The limits of your right to privacy and how much you give away in modern America in the name of `connecting people around the world.”’
Zuckerberg’s suggestion that Facebook’s data-mishandling problems have been the innocent byproduct of a plucky, upstart website growing too fast for its creators to keep up is both a grasp at a too-convenient avoidance of accountability and a denial of Facebook’s continuing inclination to remain on regulatory control’s wild frontier.
It’s no coincidence, as the Economist shrewdly pointed out this week, that Facebook spent US$11.5 million on lobbying in Washington in 2017.
Admitting wrongdoing usually comes with a price; in the case of Zuckerberg’s testimony, however, saying he’s sorry resulted in a 5.2 per cent uptick in Facebook’s stock value, which further translated into a US$3.2-billion increase to Zuckerberg’s personal wealth. Hmmm. Perhaps it’s not such a hard word, after all. The lyrics of John’s mournful, G-minor-keyed ode to broken relationship apologies also contain this line, which seems a more apt description of Zuckerberg’s congressional mea culpas and the enduring security risks faced by social-media users:
“It’s a sad, sad situation and it’s getting more and more absurd.”
“It’s a sad, sad situation and it’s getting more and more absurd.”