What's next for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg?

A year ago there were rumours he could run for president, then came a string of negative headlines. So can Mark Zuckerberg rehabilitate his reputation? Alex Hannaford investigates
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Alex Hannaford20 September 2018

"We came here for the friends, and we got to know the friends of our friends."

The one-minute film begins with a shot of a computer screen as someone clicks on Facebook’s ‘Add Friend’ button. Accompanied by some slightly mawkish piano music, profile pictures appear, then video clips — someone blows out birthday candles, friends dance. There’s an obligatory cat picture. All the things that made Facebook what it once was: personal, funny, irreverent.

"We felt a little less alone," the narrator tells us, "but then something happened: spam, clickbait, fake news, data misuse. That’s going to change."

The ad, which appeared throughout the early summer online and on TV across the United States, was designed to reassure users that the company intended to get back to its origins — its origins as, to quote Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, ‘an idealistic and optimistic company’, one that has, for most of its existence, ‘focused on all the good that connecting people can bring’.

Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the US House Energy and Commerce Committee in April this year
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Welcome to operation clean-up. A year ago Zuckerberg’s star was flying so high that there were rumours the 34-year-old might run for office. He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, 33, had even hired Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe, to lead the political advocacy team at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, their philanthropic organisation. They recruited Democratic pollster Joel Benenson as a consultant, and Zuckerberg embarked on a year-long ‘listening tour’ on which he travelled to about 30 of America’s 50 states — all of the states he hadn’t previously visited. The latter seemed very much like a try-out for hitting the campaign trail. Sure enough, he hired Charles Ommanney, a photographer for both the Bush and Obama presidential campaigns, to document his travels. Despite Zuckerberg’s denials (in a Facebook post, he wrote, "some of you have asked if this challenge means I’m running for public office. I’m not" ), rumours of ambitions for 2020 abounded.

Then came his epic fall from grace: last October, Facebook admitted that as many as 126 million American users may have seen content uploaded by Russia-based operatives. The social networking site said about 80,000 posts were produced before and after the 2016 presidential election. A month earlier, Zuckerberg had said he regretted dismissing claims of fake news on the site, writing in a post that "after the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive."

It didn’t end there. In March it was revealed that data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which had been recruited by the Trump election campaign to target potential voters using social media, had collected information on hundreds of thousands of Facebook users (their names, likes, friends lists) and accessed data on tens of millions of their contacts without permission. After a week of silence, Zuckerberg insisted it would never happen again. "We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you," he wrote in a Facebook post. The following month he was ordered to appear before Congress. In July it was revealed that an investigation into Cambridge Analytica by the US Department of Justice, the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission had been expanded to include Facebook and whether the company had lied about the scandal.

The Facebook founder’s head of political advocacy at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe.
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Now, though, Silicon Valley’s former poster boy appears determined to rehabilitate his image. There have been the inevitable apologies, pledges to ‘fix Facebook’, acknowledgements that it has a responsibility to protect its customers’ data, and even adverts at London bus stops. Not everyone believed in Facebook’s sincerity: ‘Fake News is not our friend...’ read one of Facebook’s posters designed to signal a reset. ‘...but it’s a great revenue source’, a protest group added underneath in the same typeface. Still, there’s no denying the company has been trying to win back trust: it also took out full-page ads in various Sunday newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, apologising for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, particularly. ‘This was a breach of trust, and I am sorry,’ read the quote from Zuckerberg.

It is particularly notable that this titan of the internet has engaged with old media, and sought validation from the very outlets his company looked set to replace a decade ago, like never before. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post conceding, of online misinformation campaigns, that "after 2016, it became clear that everyone — governments, tech companies and independent experts — needs to do a better job of sharing the signals and information they have to prevent this kind of abuse". Then he granted an interview to The New Yorker magazine. They published a lengthy story headlined ‘Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before it Breaks Democracy?’ Its author, Evan Osnos, spent time with Zuckerberg at his home in Palo Alto (‘a century-old white clapboard craftsman’) and at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, 10 minutes down the road.

Can the charm offensive work? Maybe, says Jason Reifler, professor of political science at the University of Exeter. "Facebook has done some very positive things. [They’ve] involved fact-checkers to downrate things it flags as false or to downrate sources in their algorithm if they have a persistent pattern of factual inaccuracy. The biggest thing Facebook has done to stop the spread of fake news is they’ve tried to de-emphasise all political news in their algorithms."

Reifler also tells me, however, that while we’re right to be concerned about fake news, it’s important to put it into perspective: "In the data that we’ve looked at, over half of all fake news consumption comes from 10 per cent of the population with the most conservative online media diets overall. In the paper we’re working on right now, we show very little evidence that fake news affected turnout in the 2016 presidential election or that it affected voter choice." In fact, Reifler says that "more people are exposed to false and misleading claims directly from politicians covered by regular media sources than they are directly from fake news."

If true, how can Zuckerberg capitalise on this? The PR game can be a brutal one. In his New Yorker interview, he talks of his interest in Ancient Rome and in particular Augustus Caesar, saying: "Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace." The titbit has made headlines, with critics pointing to parallels between Zuckerberg’s man-crush and his company’s ambitions. No wonder, as Osnos writes, Zuckerberg ‘does not enjoy interviews’.

Last April, a stern-faced, suited Zuckerberg sat down to testify before Congress after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. As well as his description of Facebook as ‘an idealistic and optimistic company’, he regaled them with examples of how the social network was a force for good. The #MeToo movement had been organised, at least in part, on Facebook, he said; people raised more than $20 million (£15m) for Hurricane Harvey relief efforts; and more than 70 million small businesses used it to create jobs. He told them that within a decade the platform would have the artificial intelligence tools to identify hate speech before it is posted; that Facebook’s biggest mistake was not ensuring the tools it made were used for good.

Above, Facebook bought full-page ads in traditional print media to apologise after the Cambridge Analytica scandal
NEIL HALL/EPA-EFE/REX/Shuttersto

Ultimately, though, his remarks did not go over well. Questions came that, for whatever reason, Zuckerberg didn’t feel he could answer. How many fake accounts have been removed? "I’m happy to have my team follow up with you," he said. Were Facebook employees involved with Cambridge Analytica’s help for Donald Trump? "I can certainly have my team get back to you." On more than 40 occasions he said his team would follow up with legislators. By the end of the hearings, Zuckerberg’s uncomfortable, robotic performance led to the inevitable memes comparing him to Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, or claiming that he was, in fact, reptilian. Even the Spanish-language press didn’t let him off the hook. "Es Mark Zuckerberg un robot?" La Raza asked.

Holding a controlling stake in the company, it is unthinkable Zuckerberg would ever leave Facebook but shareholders have been advocating for the company to spilt the roles of chairman and chief executive, both of which Zuckerberg currently holds. There have also been calls that he resign, notably from the financial columnist Felix Salmon in Wired. Asked by The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer in April if he intended to go, Zuckerberg pointed to his origin story as proof of his commitment. "We’ve also worked on a lot of hard problems over the last 14 years building Facebook. I mean, it started in a dorm room and now it’s this unprecedented community in scale and I’m very confident that we’re going to be able to work through these issues."

The thing to bear in mind is that Zuckerberg, despite his nerdiness, and as most who have met him will happily testify, is actually fairly likeable. Syracuse University’s Jennifer Stromer-Galley says while we might be intrigued by the man behind the company, ordinary users just aren’t, and as long as the features and tools Facebook provides give them benefits, they’ll keep using it. "Zuckerberg’s persona is still 'earnest college boy'. And it allows him to get away with things.

"Mark Zuckerberg is not going to hire prostitutes, he doesn’t seem racist or sexist — his number two is a woman (Sheryl Sandberg). He’s just never given the public that kind of fodder. All we have to go on are these breaches, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal feels more like a Facebook company problem rather than a Mark Zuckerberg problem."

Monica Stephens, an expert in social media and politics at the University at Buffalo in New York, agrees: "He’s a stable, responsible chief executive. He hires the best engineers, data scientists, attorneys. He understands the needs of his company and prioritises those. Compared with Elon Musk, who comes across as this nerdy-cum-party boy, Zuckerberg seems much more responsible, much more steady."

That said, Facebook could use more social scientists, Stephens says. "Every university has been gutted of their social science programmes in favour of promoting engineering and data science, so nobody has stepped back to ask: what is the impact of companies like Facebook? How are they impacting democracy? How are they impacting our lives, our attention span, our dinner conversations, our ability to interact with other people?"

Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and early Facebook investor, tells the story of the day in 2006 that Zuckerberg turned down a $1 billion offer for Facebook from Yahoo. Zuckerberg apparently told Thiel: "I don’t know what I could do with the money… I’d just start another social networking site. I kind of like the one I already have."

Perhaps in some ways, Zuckerberg is still that Harvard whizz kid glued to a computer screen enjoying the thing he has created. He doesn’t know how to do anything else other than Facebook. Yet it has become unwieldy. Whether it’s too unwieldy for Zuckerberg to rein in, time will tell, but one thing we can be sure of is that Zuckerberg will be sticking around to find out.

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