By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, April
10, 2018
Once again, Mark Zuckerberg is sorry.
The founder of Facebook, who has apologized for privacy
breaches throughout much of his company’s existence, is back at it, on a much
larger stage than ever before.
The proximate cause is the Cambridge Analytica
controversy. In violation of Facebook’s rules, the Trump-linked political
consultancy schemed to get access to the data of 87 million users. This has
made Facebook a scapegoat for President Donald Trump’s victory on par with the
Russians and James Comey (at least before the FBI director got fired and became
a Trump adversary).
In 2012, President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign did
a less underhanded version of the same thing as Cambridge. The great chronicler
of the Obama digital operation, Sasha Issenberg, wrote of how its “‘targeted
sharing’ protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of
friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.” No scandal
ensued — rather, the Obama team was hailed as geniuses who changed campaigning
forever.
It’s not Zuckerberg’s fault that he has suddenly been
deemed on the wrong side of history, but the Cambridge Analytica blowup is
bringing a useful spotlight on the most sanctimoniously self-regarding large
company in America. Facebook can’t bear to admit that it has garnered the
largest collection of data known to man to sell ads against and line the
pockets of its founder and investors.
The problem isn’t that Mark Zuckerberg is a businessman,
and an exceptionally gifted one, but that he pretends to have stumbled out of
the lyrics of John Lennon’s song “Imagine.” To listen to him, Facebook is all
about connectivity and openness — he just happens to have made roughly $63
billion as the T-shirt-wearing champion of “the global community,” whatever
that means.
It’s this pose that makes him and other Facebook
officials sound so shifty. In a rocky interview with Savannah Guthrie of the Today show last week, Sheryl Sandberg
was asked what product Facebook sells. “We’re selling the opportunity to
connect with people,” she said, before catching herself, “but it’s not for
sale.”
Something or other must be for sale, or Facebook is the
first company to rocket to the top ranks of corporate America based on having
no product or profit motive. Guthrie, persisting, stated that Facebook sweeps
up data for the use of advertisers. Sandberg objected: “We are not sweeping
data. People are inputting data.”
Uh, yeah. That’s the genius of it. In a reported exchange
with a friend while he was a student at Harvard, Zuckerberg boasted of having
data on thousands of students because “people just submitted it.”
Zuckerberg has now managed the same trick on a global
scale. On the one hand, Facebook has indeed made efforts to protect the data of
its users, knowing that it can’t risk a fundamental breach of trust. On the
other, Zuckerberg has repeatedly said he’s sorry for offenses against his users’
privacy because his business model contradicts his self-righteous public
posture.
The company is deeply committed to that posture. In the Today interview, Sandberg made a
confession as humble brag: “We were very idealistic and not rigorous enough.” In
his prepared testimony before a House committee, Zuckerberg declared: “Facebook
is an idealistic and optimistic company. For most of our existence, we focused
on all the good that connecting people can bring.”
It’s possible to imagine something like Facebook run as a
nonprofit service for the global commons. That’s not what Zuckerberg chose to
do to. To his credit, he created a compelling — nay, for some people, addicting
— product and made a killing for the ages.
Perhaps the public pressure will force the social network
to give its customers even more control over the use of their data. At a
minimum, it will have achieved something if it gets Facebook to give up the
saccharine one-world rhetoric about its mission and admit that the bottom line
is as important to it as to any other profit-making company.
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