Mark Zuckerberg started out 2018 optimistic about his ability to fix Facebook. At the time, it gave me hope that maybe he could change the company despite my long-held disagreements with its data policies and practices. What ensued was a series of disasters — 21 of them, to be exact — that has left Facebook stock in the hole without hope that things will get any better anytime soon.
What does Zuckerberg make of this?
Success. And the thing is, he’s not wrong.
Look, I’m as in love with Facebook as anyone else at the moment. Until as recently as a few months ago, I was sure that I would never work at Facebook under the current CEO. Awesome workplace environment means nothing if I can’t believe in the product I’m creating.
But for whatever reason— genuine realization of wrongs, the desire to avoid another hearing before Congress, the need to bring stock price back up — Facebook has decided to change, and that’s what we should be focusing on going into the new year.
Context
Before getting right into things, let’s clarify what our discussion concerns. We’re not talking about total success here. If we want get technical with semantics, it’s true that Zuckerberg didn’t achieve his goal this year. Facebook is far from fixed, but perhaps that was a problem with the goal to begin with. Fixing a company doesn’t exactly fit in the scope of a year. Maybe Zuckerberg did think that he could reshape a body of 25,000 people and millions of lines of code within 365 days, but it’s much more realistic for us to assume that to accomplish this goal well, its constraints made it impossible from the beginning. It’s unrealistic, then, to define success as the complete realization of our expectations.
The way Zuckerberg’s goal was a success was in terms of making real, systemic change a priority within the company. Now, there are a few things we have to recognize here:
- The “only real, systemic change” that is guaranteed is the protection of data. In order for Facebook to recover from its scandals, it has to ensure that there will be a gap between the horrors of 2018 and the next big mistake. There needs to be time for people to forget. This is an issue of cybersecurity, not of ethics.
- That said, there’s pressure for Facebook to prove that people can trust it. This is an issue of ethics because the easiest way for Facebook to gain back consumer confidence is to admit that it was wrong and show what it’s doing to be better.
- If Facebook does decide to take on the burden of being an ethical company, it could just be playing to an appearance of ethics, rather than reliance on a real system of values. We’ve already seen this in the way that Google released its A.I. Principles while secretly working on a project that directly defies those principles.
What we’re looking to examine in this conversation is not whether Facebook will be fixed in a year, but if Facebook will be fixed at all, what has contributed to that, and what it means for the industry at large.
Discussion
The reason why Zuckerberg’s goal was a success is simple: they failed so hard that they felt the need to change. I’m not saying this to be facetious or cruel. It’s a fact.
Failures are more valuable than successes. It’s a healthy thing to have one every once in a while, preferably one large enough that it’s not enough to just feel bad about it. Something needs to be done.
A case could be be made that Cambridge Analytica was one of those. Let’s look to the stock first.
Facebook Stock
The first major drop in Facebook stock was on March 17th, when The Guardian and The New York Times first broke the Cambridge Analytica story.
For another CEO, Cambridge Analytica may not have been that big of a deal. As soon as Facebook stock dipped, it came right back up. Not so for Mark Zuckerberg. It wasn’t just about the money or having to face some questions from Congress and be done with it. For him, Cambridge Analytica was a failure large enough that something had to be done, and that’s the reason why the July 25th earnings call went the way that it did.
The company decided to take even bigger steps toward security, R&D, and regulating itself. It recognized that was going to take money, and they were okay with that. They were transparent about it. Investors want to know that they’re the first priority, and Facebook was effectively saying that shareholders aren’t going to be the first priority for a while. Given the circumstances, I don’t think it was a bad choice to make. In fact, I think they should be applauded for it. It wasn’t an easy choice to make, but it was an important one.
The Trial
There were many, including me, who were disappointed by some of the questions that were asked during the Facebook trial and that the opportunity to put the company on the hot seat wasn’t put to full use. It was clear that not everyone asking questions fully understood the nature of Facebook or what was at stake during the hearing. We should take the trial seriously despite it being a sham, and here’s why:
In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg posted an apology and an explanation of the situation on Facebook, as well as in newspapers across the U.S. and the U.K. He readily responded to testifying before Congress and agreed that there should be greater regulation for technology companies.
Zuckerberg wasn’t looking for a way out. He did his best to answer the questions presented to him in court. That doesn’t mean he was without preparation and counsel. It means that he recognized there are some goals that both he and Congress have in common.
This trial was extraordinary, as Senator John Thune from South Dakota aptly stated.
Today’s hearing is extraordinary. It’s extraordinary to hold a joint committee hearing. It’s even more extraordinary for a single CEO to testify before nearly half the U.S. Senate. But then, Facebook is pretty extraordinary. More than two billion people use Facebook every month.
The trial was extraordinary in the sense that it brought technology regulation into the public eye, and it forced lawmakers to acknowledge that legislation in this field is necessary.
The trial was valuable in that it made it so Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s hearing wasn’t so extraordinary. It gave precedent for the questioning of technology companies, with a CEO interested in changing his company.
Moreover, what was interesting and valuable to me was a question asked about one of Facebook’s longtime mantras, “Move fast and break things.” Zuckerberg responded with, “I don’t know when we changed it, but the mantra is now move fast with stable infrastructure.”
If that’s indeed what Facebook is going for, then they’re headed in the right direction.
The Midterms
The midterm elections spoke to how the company was affected by the political turmoil it endured early in the year.
Facebook had to create a war room to hold back the tides of misinformation and fake news during the midterms. These days, war rooms don’t come for cheap. Sure, it was a slightly dingy war room, as The New York Times’ Kevin Roose pointed out. It wasn’t the most effective or scalable, but hey, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. An imperfect first try is unfortunate, but it doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things.
What’s important is that, six months after the trial, four months after the earnings call, Facebook is still being held accountable by itself and by the public.
On Sentiment
One of the reasons why I thought that Zuckerberg was serious about his 2018 goal was because he seemed to realize that somewhere, Facebook had gone wrong. If you look at the company’s actions through late 2017, leading into January 2018 when Zuckerberg made his announcement, the signs were there that Facebook was beginning to understand the weight of its impact.
On September 30th, 2017, Zuckerberg wrote a surprisingly candid and genuine post about his mistakes.
Tonight concludes Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews when we reflect on the past year and ask forgiveness for our mistakes. For those I hurt this year, I ask forgiveness and I will try to be better. For the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together, I ask forgiveness and I will work to do better. May we all be better in the year ahead, and may you all be inscribed in the book of life.
One month later, Facebook announced that it planned to double its safety and security team, with increased funds toward R&D.
On January 4th, 2018, Zuckerberg made it Facebook official: his 2018 goal was to fix his company.
On January 11th, Facebook overhauled its news feed to prioritize interactions between family and friends rather than media and ad agencies.
There’s no denying that this is the result of the growing criticism that Facebook has been hefting for the past two years now, but what this early awareness tells us is that Facebook’s change isn’t sudden, and it’s not just the result of the stock plunges.
Over the past few years, what we’ve seen in tech is that engineers are beginning to take personal responsibility for the products they help launch. Zuckerberg is no different. He could’ve turned his back on the ethics of the company, and he chose not to. He chose to make a difference, and the signs of that were there long before the general public began to notice.
So What?
What I’m pointing to, in this conversation as a whole, is the opportunity created by this whole ordeal: the attribution of change with improving Facebook’s bottom line. For Facebook to grow, it has to change. What that change looks like is definitely improvement of data protections and possibly a system of ethics for Facebook to rely on.
By the end of 2017, Zuckerberg was interested in changing the company, so much so that he made it the goal that defined his entire year. Because of the events of 2018, everyone else in the company is interested in it too. There’s real hope to be had that the people at HQ are interested in more than just recovery, and if that’s the case, Facebook may just be one of the most promising places to develop a code of ethics for technology today.
Up until a few months ago, I said that I would never work for Facebook under Zuckerberg. I was content to mock the trial and watch from the sidelines to see if they can pull things together. But the Facebook situation is about more than its scandals.
When Quartz reported on the Facebook trial, it claimed that Zuckerberg was “standing trial for the entire tech industry”. This is a pivotal time in history. There’s more here than just fuel for memes. This year was the beginning of a potentially huge success for Facebook, and we should all be paying attention.
