Zuckerberg’s silence reminds us that, in his eyes, we’re all just ‘dumb f*cks’
Facebook’s getting rocked by yet another electioneering crisis, but we still haven’t heard anything from its commander-in-chief.
Mark Zuckerberg has yet to issue a public statement following revelations this weekend that a Trump-aligned data firm was able to abuse his platform to manipulate 50 million people. The Facebook CEO commands massive reach on his public profile page, and he’s frequently used it to weigh in on business matters, including his social network’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
But as of Monday afternoon, the most recent public post on Zuckerberg’s profile is from two weeks ago, when he and his wife Priscilla Chan celebrated Purim.
As his company loses ~$40B in market cap, let’s turn to Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page for an update on the ongoing Cambridge Analytica scandal. Oh, wait. pic.twitter.com/ELjm4cYlvd
— Jack (@jmorse_) March 19, 2018
Sure, Zuckerberg’s most recent post aligns with his company’s new goal to prioritize friends and family. But it completely contradicts his 2018 personal goal to help fix Facebook’s gaping vulnerabilities.
“We currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post about his 2018 goals. No kidding?
To put this all in perspective, we’ll remind you that a much younger Zuckerberg once referred to people who trust him with their data as “dumb fucks.” That was in conversation with a Harvard student about why their peers had agreed to sign up for his network, at the time. And now, by failing to speak out about his platform’s misuse, it seems that he’s once again treating his users with disrespect.
It’s not that Facebook, as a company, has been silent. Last Friday, Facebook released a public statement that it had banned Cambridge Analytica from its platform — just before a joint investigation about the firm and its tactics was published by the New York Times and Observer.
And Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Facebook’s VP of AR and VR, has frequently taken to Twitter to weigh in on various matters — most notably the scandal around Russian troll farms using Facebook to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.
After the Cambridge Analytica story broke, Boz once again took to Twitter, along with Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer.
But where was Zuck? Boz may have helped create the News Feed and has led several other projects at Facebook, but as he tweeted, he wasn’t the one overseeing the work with Cambridge Analytica. And yet, that hasn’t stopped him from hosting a Q&A with himself, sharing it to his own Facebook page, and tweeting it out.
That tweet prompted angel investor Jason Calacanis to ask about Boz’s boss, Zuckerberg:
I guess Zuck is too busy to address any of this?
— jason (@Jason) March 19, 2018
Mashable reached out to Facebook for comment on Zuckerberg’s silence. No response yet.
We, along with Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), want to hear from the CEO. Sen. Wyden asked for responses to a list of pointed questions by April 13. We’d like to hear sooner. You can reach us on Twitter, by email, or, well, via Facebook.
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