Los Angeles Times

IN WASHINGTON’S SPOTLIGHT

Touting idealism yet as evasive as a tobacco executive

- MICHAEL HILTZIK

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, center, prepares to testify before a joint hearing of two Senate committees. Zuckerberg seemed to back regulation — but not too much of it.

No one should be surprised that Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg passed the test placed before him by the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on Tuesday.

It was an easy test, after all. Zuckerberg appeared in a nice suit and tie, scrubbed and polished to a glistening sheen. He addressed every questioner as “senator” or “Mr. Chairman,” kept his cool, and, when challenged on a fact or figure, promised to have “my team get back to you” with the particular­s. Rather than a novice making his first appearance on a Washington hot seat, he seemed to have perfected the smooth evasions

of a chief executive from the oil or tobacco industry.

But it also was unsurprisi­ng that, except for a few notable moments, the general discussion avoided the central issues raised by Facebook’s dominance of social media and public discussion on the internet. This evasion was only partially Zuckerberg’s. He was abetted by the fundamenta­l assumption­s shared by questioner­s and witness — that digital connectivi­ty is on balance a good thing, and worth being offered to members of the public for free.

That was the subtext of Zuckerberg’s frequent references to Facebook’s “mission,” which he defined as “connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together.”

This is a canny positionin­g of Facebook as a social service and the subtext of Zuckerberg’s opening remarks labeling Facebook “an idealistic and optimistic company” and claiming that “across the board, we have a responsibi­lity to not just build tools, but to make sure those tools are used for good.”

This is, of course, nonsense. Facebook isn’t an “idealistic” company, but a commercial enterprise purveying private data to advertiser­s. Most of the informatio­n that passes through its servers isn’t for “good” or “bad” in any moral or social sense, but for profit — Facebook’s, or someone else’s.

It’s commonly noted but just as commonly overlooked that Facebook’s customers aren’t its billions of users. The users are Facebook’s raw material, offered for sale to its real customers, who are its advertiser­s. That’s why Facebook’s efforts to protect its users’ privacy have been so feeble. “Your business model is to monetize informatio­n,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) observed. Placing users’ informatio­n behind high walls conflicts with the model.

Zuckerberg treats it as a virtue that users get access to Facebook for free. But it’s not really free, as Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) pointed out in a rare moment of clarity. “Websites that don’t charge for access extract value in other ways,” Hatch said. The relevant issue, he said, was whether users “understand what they’re agreeing to when they access a website.… Are websites upfront about how they extract value from users, or do they hide the ball?”

What may have been obscured is how closely Zuckerberg stuck to a script he has followed for decades: push the envelope of commercial exploitati­on of user informatio­n, express contrition when he’s caught crossing the line and promise to do better in future.

Zuckerberg didn’t depart materially from his long-term claim that users have plenty of control over how their personal informatio­n is used on Facebook. “Zuckerberg has always pushed to reconceptu­alize conversati­ons about privacy into conversati­ons about ‘control,’ ” observes Nicholas Proferes, a veteran follower of Zuckerberg’s public statements and an expert on social media at the University of Kentucky.

“It’s a way of pushing the issue onto individual users to make a choice about how they want to enact control over their data,” he told me, “rather than taking a broader look at the changes that Facebook is having on society in terms of how we view privacy or how we commoditiz­e data.”

Even though Zuckerberg expressed contrition from the witness table about the Cambridge Analytica affair and pledged his commitment to “getting it right,” Facebook still hasn’t accepted legal responsibi­lity for the misuse of its users’ data by Cambridge Analytica. We know that based on a legal motion the company filed Friday in federal court, where it’s facing at least 14 class-action lawsuits alleging the misuse of personal data.

In that filing, Facebook calls the lawsuits “misguided,” because “Facebook broke no laws and violated no legal duties.” It adds that “although Cambridge Analytica and other related actors used data for purposes that Facebook and its users never authorized, there was no data breach — no unauthoriz­ed access to Facebook’s systems and no hacking of user data.”

This falls into the category of slicing the baloney very thin. It’s a signal that despite Zuckerberg’s equable responses to his congressio­nal interrogat­ors, the company is going to fob off onto its clients its own duty to protect its users’ data.

By the way, it’s far from clear that “Facebook broke no laws.” The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigat­ion into whether the company violated a 2011 consent order requiring that it “address privacy risks associated with the developmen­t and management of new and existing products and services, and to protect the privacy and confidenti­ality of consumers’ informatio­n.” If the FTC concludes that Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica or anyone else to extract and exploit confidenti­al informatio­n from its users, the onus may well be on Facebook.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) made that very point during Tuesday’s hearing, asserting that Facebook’s indulgence toward Cambridge Analytica was “in effect willful blindness” and a violation of the FTC order.

During his testimony Tuesday, Zuckerberg expressed a willingnes­s to “work with” various lawmakers to craft some variety of regulation over user data. But in other contexts, Zuckerberg has made it plain that this willingnes­s will go only so far.

What remains unclear is how far Facebook is willing to go to alter its business model to address growing concerns about its grip on individual­s’ private data — and how far American lawmakers are willing to go to force it to tighten up.

“I don’t think we’re going to see the kind of innovation­s we’d like to see around consumer protection if Facebook is left entirely to write the regulation­s for itself,” says Safiya U. Noble, an expert on digital media platforms at USC.

Federal regulation­s may not be enough, she adds. It may not be true, as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) implied during the hearing, that Facebook has an effective monopoly on the social media space, but it’s certainly the case that private companies have acquired a vise grip on public discourse.

“Will there be federal dollars appropriat­ed toward public informatio­n projects, so we’re not just left to corporatio­ns to be the arbiters of the important informatio­n we need in a democracy?” Noble asks. “We’ve seen a rapid divestment in public media, public education, and public libraries. These are the institutio­ns that stand in opposition to commercial media. You can’t have regulation on one hand without also investing in alternativ­es.”

That’s true. The fundamenta­l problem with Facebook isn’t merely that it has misled users about how exposed their private informatio­n is, or how indifferen­t it has been to its own clients’ misuse of that data. It’s that Facebook has become one of the very few public platforms people use to connect with each other, and that it has never come to grips with the responsibi­lity that gives it to make sure users know how their private lives are exploited.

Several of the lawmakers confrontin­g Zuckerberg pledged to regulate the company’s business if it doesn’t regulate itself. What history tells us is that it won’t regulate itself. The ball is in Congress’ court.

 ?? Chip Somodevill­a Getty Images ??
Chip Somodevill­a Getty Images
 ?? Alex Wong Getty Images ?? COMMENTS by Mark Zuckerberg on Capitol Hill suggest he is receptive to rules that don’t challenge Facebook’s core business.
Alex Wong Getty Images COMMENTS by Mark Zuckerberg on Capitol Hill suggest he is receptive to rules that don’t challenge Facebook’s core business.
 ?? Shawn Thew EPA/Shuttersto­ck ?? SEN. John Thune, left, listens while fellow Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley questions Zuckerberg during his testimony Tuesday.
Shawn Thew EPA/Shuttersto­ck SEN. John Thune, left, listens while fellow Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley questions Zuckerberg during his testimony Tuesday.
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 ?? Alex Brandon Associated Press ?? SENATORS GRILL Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg about data used by Cambridge Analytica at a hearing.
Alex Brandon Associated Press SENATORS GRILL Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg about data used by Cambridge Analytica at a hearing.

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