Mark Zuckerberg: The Punching bag

I have been quietly following the whole Facebook drama for a while now and appreciate the gravity of the situation. Reading the commentary has been informative, amusing and sometimes just downright sad.

Some commentators have decided that Mark is a Zionist and a piece of trash, others have attacked how he looked on the TV with their clever memes. Some have declared that they would never hire someone who has worked for Facebook because the very act of working there makes them untrustworthy given they have compromised morality.

I understand the anger but I also remind myself of a few things:

• When Mark Zuckerberg started all of this, he was just a kid. Like all kids, he wanted attention and like all of us in our youth, he made some bad decisions most likely because of stupidity rather than malicious intent.
• There is no playbook for the problems we are addressing in this day and age.
• The scale of Facebook is unprecedented, with scale comes a completely different set of unforeseen problems which are much clearer in hindsight.
• Engineers are humans and sometimes engineers in their excitement with new toys end up being blindsided
• Facebook is not just Mark Zuckerberg, he is not the only decision maker. It is a huge machinery that involves many actors.
• As these are new problems, legislation is just catching up. We should all be equally angry at our political leaders for allowing this to happen.
• Facebook is a tool, it’s entirely up to me how I use (or don’t) it. I should be angry at myself equally for being part of this and letting my friends down whose data went into the wrong hands. I can’t absolve myself by pleading ignorance and blaming it all on Facebook.
• It is hard (impossible?) to measure if Facebook overall has made the world a better place or not. However, I do know of many stories where people have (re)established contact with their friends and loved ones because of Facebook.
• It’s easy to say things like ‘Do what you love’, ‘Your job should result in making the world a better place’ etc. Have we ACTUALLY provided the right environment where that is even possible? Where make-the-world better organisations are still underfunded and rely heavily on volunteers.
• Having Facebook or Google as your employer on your CV has a significant impact on your career trajectory. As a community we just can’t keep changing the rules overnight where it’s fabulous to work there one day and it’s horrendous the next.
• Blaming the entire workforce of thousands of people because of the oversight, negligence or malicious intent of the few is akin to many of the other gross over-generalisations that we are trying to weed out as a society.
• Surely Mark and Facebook has inspired and helped a lot of people to get up and do their own thing.
• User engagement is a slippery slope, in the eagerness to please the user and not see them leave can blindside many astute decision makers. Facebook probably did create a bubble for the user to live in but how is that really different that what most of us do in our real lives? How many times do we go out and seek to understand the opposite side of the argument? Did people not prefer a newspaper that mildly (or radically) supported their existing views in the past?
• “Virtue signaling” as the term goes these days is easy. It’s no different than yelling at the TV when your favourite sports team messes up.
• No, blockchain is not the answer to all of our privacy problems.
• In hindsight, these mistakes were bound to happen. There are deep lessons in these mistakes and Facebook is paving the way for a world where fewer will repeat them. We are making history by now coming up with a checklist of things that are a big no-no.

I remember the whole Lance Armstrong episode and how everyone tore him down. What he did was undoubtedly wrong however I keep thinking about the kids and people with disabilities and cancer he ended up inspiring, maybe even saved a few lives. Surely they would have been heart-broken when they learned the truth but maybe he saved them when they needed the most saving by being a hero (even a fake one)?

A lot of us look up to our parents, call them our hero to learn later on that they are just human and fallible like everyone else but we find ways to forgive them and learn from their mistakes. We forgive them for the times they bought us that book that changed our life, or stood behind us like a rock when we need them. Maybe we should view the world a bit more like that. Maybe we should focus on learning from the mistakes made by fallible human beings and not focus on tearing them down the first opportunity we get.