Zuckerberg’s wilful blindness to Facebook’s dark side

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                                     (Commentary Today Monday 9 April 2018)

    Zuckerberg’s wilful blindness to Facebook’s dark side

By Andrew Hill

As Facebook’s trials have deepened, Mr Zuckerberg, by contrast, has become entangled in the utopian

idea that he leads a global community, says the author. THE NEW YORK TIMES

Updated 09 April, 2018

When Mark Zuckerberg appears before a United States congressional committee on Tuesday (April 10), he will doubtless expand on what seems to be Facebook’s new mission.

The “move fast and break things” mantra of the social network’s early days is long gone; now it is more like move slow and fix things. Plenty is broken.

A scandal that has exposed the data of up to 87 million Facebook users is only the most pressing privacy problem US lawmakers must address.

Even closer to their hearts is Facebook’s role as inadvertent facilitator of Russian meddling in elections. The company is one year into a “massive three-year push” to mend such breaches of trust, Mr Zuckerberg told journalists last week.

Presenting to Congress, he would be well advised to smarten up (he wore a tie for the whole of recession-hit 2009, to signal that “this was a serious year”) and to continue channelling the contrite, open attitude he showed in that recent press conference.

While I am pleased Mr Zuckerberg is belatedly leading the public response to criticism, I’m cynical enough to know that much of his new approach is a well-rehearsed act.

I don’t accept that Mr Zuckerberg is an evil genius who always intended to create a machine to harvest our private lives, whatever the consequences.

But I do believe he, his sidekick Sheryl Sandberg and their colleagues have been wilfully blind to the dark side-effects of their own algorithmic virtuosity.

Mr Zuckerberg repeatedly acknowledged last week that the group should have taken “a broader view of [its] responsibility”. That is tantamount to recognition that he often adopted a narrow view because it would have been commercially inconvenient to do otherwise.

Facebook has also swallowed whole its own idealistic, and self-trumpeted belief that it is a force for good.

With a sort of wistfulness, the founder points out that, thanks to Facebook, “families have been reconnected, people have gotten married . . . social movements and marches have been organised . . . and tens of millions of small business now have better tools to grow”.

But this “net positive” approach no longer washes with most users, and it certainly won’t wash with Congress. Mr Zuckerberg still sounds like a man betrayed by his own Facebook friends.

His confusion reminds me of the time I interviewed Sir Terry Leahy, the former Tesco chief executive, and asked him how he felt when the UK supermarket chain came under attack from some of its own shoppers for being “too big”.

It threw him, he admitted, because “all we’d set out to do is build and create a good business . . . that serves society, that serves individuals very, very well”.

Sir Terry, at least, recognised that Tesco, while part of society, was also a business with customers, which cannot exist without each other.

As Facebook’s trials have deepened, Mr Zuckerberg, by contrast, has become entangled in the utopian idea that he leads a global community.

His use of the first-person plural is one symptom. As recently as last summer, Mr Zuckerberg’s “we” and “us” represented a mushy combination of him, his colleagues and all Facebook users. “As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people!” he posted last June.

“We’re making progress connecting the world, and now let’s bring the world closer together. It’s an honour to be on this journey with you.”

Now, though, there are multiplying exceptions to this honour, including Macedonian trolls, some data-mining university researchers and fake-news propagators.

All share Mr Zuckerberg’s 2018 resolution of “making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent”.

What better way to spend time on Facebook, if you are bent on destabilising peaceful democracies, than using it to swing an election? But at last, 14 years after launching TheFacebook as a student, Mr Zuckerberg has realised that as founder and controlling shareholder of a dominant online community, his broader responsibility includes distinguishing between a dangerous “them” and a friendly “us”.

“The different people that use Facebook have different interests,” he said last week. “Some people want to share political speech that they think is valid, and other people feel like it’s hate speech. And then, people ask us, ‘Are you just leaving that up because you want people to be able to share more?’ These are real values and questions and trade-offs.”

I am glad Mr Zuckerberg recognises that managing such trade-offs is more complex, more important and more morally difficult than solving a gnarly software challenge.

But Congress might usefully ask why it took him so long to understand that Facebook is not the solution but part of the problem. THE FINANCIAL TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT.