The Irreversible Damage of Mark Zuckerberg’s Silence

Facebook was forged in its founders image. So unlike traditional companies—say Google or Microsoft—Zuckerberg’s silence has already harmed his bottom line.
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“I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform,” wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement that addressed a series of news stories reporting Facebook’s data had been misused. In the 937-word statement, posted on his Facebook profile Wednesday afternoon, Zuckerberg outlined all that Facebook has done and plans to do to keep our data safe.

But while he has addressed the news issue he hasn’t addressed the underlying problem. By the time Mark Zuckerberg made his amends it was already too late.

What has happened in the last five days has been the biggest crisis of Facebook’s existence. But Zuckerberg’s five-day silent treatment may prove more damning for Facebook than any of the news that precipitated it. This wouldn’t be nearly as extreme crisis for most companies. When bad things happen at other Fortune 500 companies, there is a script they follow—call it good crisis PR. The head of communications promises to look into an issue. A CEO makes a statement, well-reviewed by the legal team beforehand. If the crisis is really bad, someone resigns or gets fired. Once the perceived villain has been held accountable, everyone returns to normal unscathed. These corporate theatrics have come to embody the acceptable approach to business accountability.

But Facebook has always been a different kind of company—billing itself as a more intimate, personal service than, say, a car manufacturer (like Volkswagen) or an oil distributor (like BP). After all, what Facebook is selling is intimacy: a place to house your thoughts and opinions, and connect to friends and family. You can trust Facebook—you have to! You friends are here! And your number one friend, Mark Zuckerberg, is always at the ready to tell you what Facebook is doing and why.

Until the past year, this approach to building Facebook has been Zuckerberg’s chief asset. He intuited earlier than most that a decade after the internet’s introduction, people had begun to trust individuals over companies, and the best way to build a 21st century business was to build it in the guise of a person. As he told Bloomberg BusinessWeek last fall, “People trust people, not institutions.”

The service he built has only accelerated this shift. By its nature, Facebook elevates individuals while deprecating institutions. Individuals are the atoms, connecting to one another to spread information. Institutions get “pages,” which can be liked and shared—or ignored—by those people. Facebook’s role in society has been to transfer to individuals many of the activities, like recommending news articles, sourcing vacation destinations, and figuring out the best twin stroller for city dwellers, that used to reside with institutions.

But for Facebook to succeed in the midst of this shift in authority, Zuckerberg knew it needed a relatable individual to be a stand-in for the company—a recognizable, authentic voice who users felt they knew. That proxy would be Zuckerberg. So, as the service has grown from a place for college kids’ to poke each other to a global communications utility, he has repositioned himself into a pseudo-statesman. He has spoken at the United Nations General Assembly. He has started a hybrid philanthropy and investment outfit to put his billiions of dollars to work in service of solving intractable social problems. Last year he traveled to all fifty states, photographer in tow. All of this has been documented on his Facebook profile, along with photos in which he’s baking with his wife for the Jewish holidays or celebrating the Chinese New Year with his children. Inside Facebook, there are communications professionals dedicated to reviewing and ghostwriting his posts, and helping him craft and maintain this profile, which has more than 105 million followers. (For context, that’s just less than the total subscriber base of Netflix.)

Early on, this strategy worked. Facebook’s users were, like Zuckerberg, American Ivy Leaguers interested in using his network for similar things—dating, posting drunk selfies, dating. Facebook’s problems were comparably narrow, and when the company clashed with users—usually by overstepping in the way it introduced new services, causing users to fear they were ceding too much control of personal information—Zuckerberg could speak to them directly. The first such letter I remember arrived in September 2006, just after Facebook launched the News Feed. “We really messed this one up,” it began. He explained himself, asked for patience, and suggested a fix. This approach became Zuckerberg’s playbook for addressing problems. It mostly worked. Facebookers forgave Zuckerberg, er, Facebook—or at least continued to use its service.

But over this past year, this approach has frayed. Increasingly, it has become obvious there are things our friend Zuckerberg isn’t telling us. In February, this magazine put a battered image of Zuckerberg on the cover, detailing the company’s desperate efforts to address news and information. Now comes the revelation that for several years, Facebook allowed third parties to access vast amounts of our personal information, and the company was both lax in monitoring how those groups used that data, and slow to address abuse when it was discovered. These facts reveal Facebook’s struggles over how to address the challenges that the openness it has always prized has wrought. They raise questions about the degree to which Facebook has acted and is acting in the best interest of its users, and suggest the possibility that Facebook has, at times, covered up information. And they force us all to ask: Can Mark Zuckerberg be trusted?

This is an existential question for the company. Because there’s one great challenge with empowering trust in people over institutions: People are fickle. They change. They disappoint. Sometimes, in moments of crisis, they ghost us. Individuals are easily taken down by a moment that shifts our perception of their character. Which leaves Facebook’s leader with an unenviable task: If Zuckerberg wants us to believe now that his company is not vulnerable, he must shore up trust in himself as an individual. It’s his only way forward.

For the past five days, government officials have summoned Zuckerberg to speak. Journalists have demanded to hear from him. His own employees have used Twitter and even Facebook to try to stand up for the company he started, but he’s been absent. He didn’t show up at the company’s own internal staff meeting on Tuesday afternoon. Finally, he has weighed in, with, of course, a Facebook post and the promise of a television interview. Less than a half hour later, the post had 3,100 comments. “So basically you knew this shit was going on years ago and NOW since you've been caught with your pants down, this is your response?” one commenter wrote, summarizing a particularly common response. “Pathetic. I really do hope Congress makes you testify.”

It will take more than charming posts showing Zuckerberg baking in his kitchen to appease the regulators who are now stepping up, and countless displays of intimacy to win back the trust of his users.

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