Mark Zuckerberg has had a hell of a month. Through the back half of September, a series of investigative Wall Street Journal reports based on internal Facebook documents painted a grim picture of the company—and sent stocks sliding. Then, on Sunday, the whistleblower who leaked those documents, Frances Haugen, appeared on 60 Minutes, where she described the social media giant as a destructive force in society that has consistently put profits over people. Amid the fallout from the primetime interview the next day, an outage shut Facebook and its suite of apps down for hours, a crash that lost Zuckerberg six billion dollars over the course of a single afternoon. He got little relief Tuesday: Haugen appeared on Capitol Hill, where she likened Facebook to a tobacco company and urged lawmakers to regulate it as such. And even in a sharply divided Washington, where it’s damn near impossible to find common ground on questions as basic as should you take a safe, effective vaccine or a horse dewormer to treat COVID-19?, a bipartisan panel of senators was receptive to the message.
“In a Senate that often seems proudly dysfunctional, yesterday’s hearing on Facebook seemed like a throwback to a more bipartisan era,” John Avlon said Wednesday on CNN, adding “the senators’ common ground was a resounding dislike for their business practices.” Or, as Esquire’s Charles Pierce put it: “The prevailing image of Facebook from both sides of the committee, and certainly from the witness table, was that of a faceless Borg-like collective, feeding and refueling itself on the grist it makes out of the lives of people it will never see.”
Various company representatives—including Nick Clegg, who dismissed comparisons between Big Tech and Big Tobacco by telling CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday that “there has to be a reason why a third of the world’s population enjoys using these apps”—have tried to put out the fire, only to watch the flames grow. So, following Haugen’s testimony Tuesday, Zuckerberg himself sought to intervene. In a note to employees that he posted to Facebook, the founder and CEO described coverage of the company’s woes as “hard to read” because it “doesn’t reflect the company we know.”
“We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health,” Zuckerberg insisted. “It’s difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives. At the most basic level, I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.”
Much of Zuckerberg’s statement struck a defensive tone, maintaining that the company is doing “good work” and pushing back on basic aspects of the Journal’s reporting and Haugen’s testimony. Facebook, he said, is not ignoring its own internal research, Instagram is actually good for kids’ mental health, and the company does not benefit from divisive or otherwise toxic content. “At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being,” Zuckerberg wrote. “That’s just not true.” But, as the New York Times’ Kara Swisher noted, Zuckerberg’s statement casting Facebook as the victim may have been the company’s strongest response yet—a “very low bar,” as Swisher emphasized—and did leave some room for a productive path forward; Zuckerberg does, for instance, reiterate support for federal regulations. “I don’t believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own,” he wrote.
But those more promising areas were overshadowed by familiar spin. The claim that Facebook thrives on outrage, for example, is “deeply illogical,” according to Zuckerberg: “We make money from ads,” he wrote, “and advertisers consistently tell us they don’t want their ads next to harmful or angry content.” That may be true, but as BuzzFeed’s Max Woolf observed, “anger” is a relative term: Content from the right-wing personalities like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, who consistently churn out some of the highest-performing posts on the platform, is plenty toxic, but not to its target audience, who react to such material with approval rather than anger. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg may not recognize the company described by his critics, but the characterization put forth by Haugen certainly doesn’t seem too outlandish to others.
It’s been a turbulent stretch for Facebook, but it’s not over. Haugen says she has plans to speak to Congress again, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, chair of the subcommittee that hosted her Tuesday, predicted more whistleblowers would follow her lead. Blumenthal also said Wednesday that Zuckerberg himself would be getting an invite to appear before the committee in the coming weeks. “We’re going to invite him, ask him to come,” the Democrat said. “I can’t tell you whether he will accept, but I think Mark Zuckerberg has an obligation to tell it to the American people himself.”
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