Protecting Facebook means stepping into spotlight
SAN FRANCISCO: For many years, Mark Zuckerberg left matters in Washington to his deputies, who have long experience in politics. The Facebook chief executive instead focused on Facebook’s future, overseeing the development of cutting- edge technologies such as virtual reality and live video streaming.
Now, the insularity that shielded Zuckerberg from having to directly defend Facebook in front of law makers and regulators has finally cracked. This week, for the first time, the 33-year- old billionaire is scheduled to testify before Congress, part of a crusade to protect not only the company he founded as a college dropout but also his broader legacy. Whether Facebook - and other tech giants, including Google and Twitter - faces more regulation hangs in part on what he says during two long hearings. Instead of planning for the future, Zuckerberg is scrambling to buy time to fix Facebook’s past mistakes.
Zuckerberg travelled to Washington, D.C., over the weekend and has holed up with advisers to prepare for the hearings, people who work with him said. One of those advisers was Reginald Brown, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, from the Washington law firm WilmerHale. Zuckerberg is training for the hearings as a candidate would for a debate, engaging in role play; getting coached on how not to appear defensive; and anticipating questions about data privacy, disinformation, his ability to prevent foreign interference in elections and whether the company’s business model causes harm. Along with Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, he has gone on a rare media tour to emphasise that fixing Facebook will take several years.
The chief executive is driven, according to more than a dozen colleagues and friends, by an optimistic desire for the social network to be seen not only as a ubiquitous communication tool - as necessary as the Internet itself - but as a product people love. The same idealism that led him to create his unprecedented social network also led to blind spots, they said. But he is now starting to understand that saving Facebook will require him to evolve personally, said early Facebook investor Reid Hoffman.
“I think Mark thinks, ‘ If people can see the product, they can see what we’re trying to do, and so they don’t need to talk to me,’ “he said. “But being a leader of a company that is a ‘social infrastructure’ - that is a major part of people’s lives - means that lots of people need to see a person, too.”
Zuckerberg’s optimism has butted up against widespread public disappointment and growing pressure for more regulation from law makers in the United States and Europe. Facebook recently admitted that a Trump- campaign- connected data consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, misappropriated the personal information of up to 87 million people, which prompted lawmakers to call for the hearings that are set for Tuesday and Wednesday. Facebook also disclosed that its search tool enabled “malicious actors” to scrape the profiles of nearly all 2.2 billion Facebook users.
Consumer outrage has given rise to a # DeleteFacebook campaign, and the company’s stock price - invincible for most of Facebook’s six years as a public company - has tumbled 14 per cent in the past three weeks. A recent study by the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that just 12 per cent of people trusted Facebook as a news source. Another poll by Axios and Survey-Monkey found that Facebook’s favorability fell 28 points in the past five months - more than twice as much as that of rivals Amazon and Google.
The rising sense of distrust is upsetting to Zuckerberg, a man so concerned about his public image that he once kept a fulltime personal pollster on staff to gauge granular shifts in the public’s perception of him. It’s a stark reversal from even last year, when a tour he conducted of the country led pundits to conclude that he might run for president. ( He has said he doesn’t want to.)
Facebook did not make Zuckerberg available for an interview for this article, citing his need to focus on the hearings.
In a copy of prepared testimony released before the hearings, Zuckerberg emphasised his ownership of the company’s mistakes and apologised for not recognising that digital tools that can do immense good can also be used for harm.
“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”
The chief executive’s congressional performance could help determine how much regulation Facebook faces in the years to come. Bills to regulate technology companies, which have long benefited from less government oversight than other industries, are moving forward in Congress and in Facebook’s home state, California. Next month Europe will usher in a sweeping new data privacy regime that will penalise companies that misuse data with fines of up to four per cent of global profits.
Critics say Facebook’s “move fast and break things” culture, embodied by Zuckerberg, will not fundamentally change without government taking a stronger hand.
“I have zero confidence that Facebook should be allowed to self-regulate,” said Jim Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a group that advocates for technology companies to take more steps to protect children. “The eighth version of ‘ I’m sorry’ or ‘ trust us’ is just not acceptable.”
Zuckerberg and his top deputies have long held deep concerns about governments exercising more control of the technology industry.
For the past two years, senior executives have “been kept up at night” by concerns that Facebook would be perceived as too powerful and invite more regulation, said a person who was involved with the discussions.
Zuckerberg has a more complicated approach to the question of Facebook’s power. He has expressed worries, sometimes in jest, about the government shutting down Facebook one day, said two people who worked with him closely - and recently said he was considering how to create an independent board of outside experts to review Facebook’s decisions on scrubbing content. But he also has embraced Facebook’s unprecedented role in the world, telling close colleagues that he would rather run Facebook than be the president of the United States, said one of the people.
The rising sense of distrust is upsetting to Zuckerberg, a man so concerned about his public image that he once kept a full-time personal pollster on staff to gauge granular shifts in the public’s perception of him.