Mark Zuckerberg Beta-Tests New Apology Algorithm
After not saying anything at all for several days following the news that Cambridge Analytica had pillaged millions of Facebook users’ data, on Wednesday Mark Zuckerberg made several attempts at what human beings call an apology, presumably after a less robotic person at the company informed him it was the right thing to do. He began on his own Facebook page, claiming that although Facebook’s platform allowed researcher Aleksandr Kogan to access millions of people’s information, Kogan wasn’t supposed to then turn around and share it without those people’s consent, and that Facebook has since made it impossible for other apps to pull a similar move. From there, he made stops at a host of media outlets, where he emitted further facsimiles of regret, the highlights of which include:
Telling CNN that Facebook may have had an impact on the 2016 election, but he’s still not sure: “It’s really hard for me to have a full assessment of that,” he said.
Claiming to The New York Times that even though he essentially set up Facebook to see how many people would blindly turn over their data to him—“I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS,” Zuckerberg wrote a friend while at Harvard. “People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks”—and that the platform, by design, allowed Kogan to access millions of people’s information, no one could have seen this whole election-meddling thing coming: “If you had asked me, when I got started with Facebook, if one of the central things I’d need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in each other’s elections,” he said. “There’s no way I thought that’s what I’d be doing, if we talked in 2004 in my dorm room.”
Responding to the Times’s question about whether or not he feels “any guilt about the role Facebook is playing in the world,” which has included not only enabling election meddling, but facilitating violence in Myanmar, by talking about how great Facebook is: “That’s a good question,” he told Kevin Roose. “I think, you know, we’re doing something here which is unprecedented, in terms of building a community for people all over the world to be able to share what matters to them, and connect across boundaries. I think what we’re seeing is, there are new challenges that I don’t think anyone had anticipated before.”
Conceding he’s not sure that user data didn’t fall into the hands of Russian operatives: “I can’t really say that [didn’t happen],” he told Wired. “I hope that we will know that more certainly after we do an audit.”
Perhaps the best moment, though, came during his interview with Recode, when he said that though he would theoretically be open to testifying before Congress, he would only do so if it turned out that he, the founder and C.E.O. of the company, is determined to be the proper person to speak on the matter. “I’m open to doing that,” he told Kara Swisher and Kurt Wagner. “We actually do this fairly regularly . . . There are lots of different topics that Congress needs and wants to know about, and the way that we approach it is that our responsibility is to make sure that they have access to all of the information that they need to have. So I’m open to doing it if I’m the right [person].”
The carefully hedged needle-threading continued over at CNN, where Zuck told Laurie Segall that maybe, under the right circumstances, the social-media giant could use a reining in. “I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated,” he said. ”I think in general technology is an increasingly important trend in the world. I think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than ‘yes or no should we be regulated?’”
Though he efforted some impressive forehead wrinkling for the occasion, Zuckerberg did not address what the quote-unquote right regulation would look like, and why Facebook initially declined to notify users that their data had been siphoned in the first place. On the whole, Zuck has gotten better at apologizing over time—less likely to blame the idiot masses for failing to understand how something works, and more likely to make simple alterations to his product, if he knows it will make people feel better about using it. His mea culpa will likely appease the vast majority; so far, most advertisers haven’t pulled their money, and despite the trending #DeleteFacebook hashtag, it’s not clear that users have left en masse. But Zuck’s media tour doesn’t change the fact that Facebook’s core business model relies on data mining. The minority, in other words, will be waiting with bated breath for the company’s next crisis.
