The anti-social network: Facebook bids to rebuild trust after toughest week
Mark Zuckerberg began 2018 vowing to “fix Facebook.” Three months in, and after one of the worst weeks in the company’s history with $60 billion wiped off its market value, that job is more urgent than ever.
Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the Facebook co-founder has been on the defensive over the proliferation of fake news and targeted political adverts on the platform. He initially dismissed the idea that content on the site influenced the election as a “pretty crazy idea” before backtracking.
He now faces a more fundamental challenge: to restore trust in the social network. The revelations that Cambridge Analytica, the data company hired by Mr. Trump’s campaign, had obtained Facebook data harvested from 50 million people and allegedly used to target voters in the US have triggered questions about the protection of privacy. They have also magnified calls for tougher regulation that could potentially hamper the group’s business model.
“If you had told me in 2004, when I was just getting started with Facebook, that a big part of my responsibility today would be to help protect the integrity of elections, I wouldn’t really believe it,” he told CNN on Wednesday. With politicians and regulators calling on him to testify, and some users deleting the app, he admitted that the company had made mistakes.
Cambridge Analytica recognized that Facebook’s power lay in its data, its scale and its ability to target individuals with precision. Christopher Wylie, a whistle-blower who worked for the UK-based company, told The Observer that it broke Facebook’s rules to obtain data on 50 million users. It then used that data to compile psychographic profiles that classify people by personality type, so it could target them with the political messages most likely to hit home.
The opening exploited by Cambridge Analytica can be linked directly to the choices Mr. Zuckerberg made during Facebook’s early years that have helped shape the business: his lack of attention to privacy, his rush to open up to developers, his pursuit of a business model based on targeted advertising. He, and others at Facebook, ignored warnings from employees and activists that they were going down the wrong path.
Kate Losse, Mr. Zuckerberg’s former speech writer and author of The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network, says that when Facebook decided to open up to developers in 2007, her boss was “very excited.”
“This excitement was expressed more often than concerns about privacy. This isn’t to say that he didn’t think about privacy, but conversations about the platform were focused on its business and technical potential,” she says.
Steve Bannon, former chief strategist for Mr. Trump and one-time vicepresident at Cambridge Analytica, blamed Facebook for collecting the data later used by the company. “That is Facebook’s business,” he told the FT Future of News conference on Thursday. “They take your stuff for free and sell it and monetize it for huge margins . . . then they write algorithms and run your life.”
Facebook was built on the idea that “sharing” was natural to a new generation. Mr. Zuckerberg said in 2010 that “social norms” around privacy were changing. When the social network began to try to generate revenue, it realized that user data were its treasure.
Mr. Zuckerberg told Recode, the technology news website, this week that he may have been “too idealistic” in opening Facebook up to developers.
“They simply allowed an advertising based system to get out of control,” says David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect. “You could use the word greed if you wanted to be uncharitable. They clearly prioritized growing profits over cautionary controls.”
Inside the company, some worried the treasure was luring bad actors. Sandy Parakilas was responsible for compliance and data protection for apps from 2011 to 2012. In evidence to a UK parliamentary select committee this week, he said he had warned Facebook it was losing control of data to third-party developers. He mapped the vulnerabilities of the system, including a list of threats which, even then, included foreign states and data brokers.
But his advice was not heeded. Damian Collins MP, chair of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee, asked: “So it sounds like they turned a blind eye because they did not want to find out the truth?” Mr. Parakilas replied: “That was my impression, yes.”