Facebook execs lie a lot - so why believe anything they say?
Zuckerberg has created a standard that is unlike any in our business - and more akin to Trump
In the media world, we’re used to spin.
Our new lineup features the number one new dramedy on Thursday mornings among Samoan Millennials. The Glam Media network is comprised of only premium, above-the-fold placements. ABC’s executive team is fully behind “Cop Rock” Mr. O’Reilly is taking a long ago planned vacation.
But outright lying - we usually don’t go that far.
Yet the biggest media company in the world, Facebook, lies all the time, to a degree that’s astonishing. That is if you ever stop to think about it anymore because it’s so commonplace. (BTW, yes Facebook is a tech company, a social network, etc - it’s most definitely a media company that is primarily in the advertising sales business).
Amazingly Facebook straight-up lies - not spins, but says things it knows not to be true, and it doesn’t seem to ever dent its business.
By now you’ve read or at least read lots of summaries or the mind-blowing (except in many ways not shocking at all) Wall Street Journal series “The Facebook Files.” There are so many wild angles one could take in what feels like the internet’s version of Watergate-meets-The Pentagon Papers. Let’s pick one.
Facebook said its 2018 algorithm tweak was designed to bring back more positive engagements between friends and family. But as Alex Kantrowitz points out in his newsletter Big Technology, this move was all about business, and a fear of losing customers. They didn’t want you to get back in touch with Aunt Peggy, they wanted you to like or comment on or share Aunt Peggy’s posts - or scream at Aunt Peggy’s posts - as long as you clicked more and fed the ad/data engine.
There is a never-ending list of these bold misstatements, including Sheryl Sandberg’s contention that January 6th was not organized on Facebook, to Zuckerberg’s famous quip that any notion that Facebook influenced the 2016 election was a “pretty crazy idea.”
We could do this all day, but at a certain point, it becomes like listing all the horrible things Tucker Carlson has said. It starts to feel like nothing matters.
Except that Facebook still has to look people in the eye and do business with them. My question is, why believe anything anyone there tells you? And does that even matter?
I’m not saying every sales executive or ad ops person or senior engineer at Facebook is a liar. There are tons and tons of great, smart, kind, want-to-do-the-right-thing people at Facebook.
Yet an organization is eventually, if not at the outset, subsumed by its leadership’s culture. They set the tone. There were surely lots of smart, nice, well-meaning people in the Trump White House - but would you be inclined to believe anything they told you?
That’s why you have to start to wonder, every time Facebook ‘miscounts’ video views for like two years, or overestimates the size of the US population, or misrepresents potential reach or is late to explain how Apple is affecting its ability to track attribution - and executives explain these issues away as never-noticed bugs or just innocent oopsies - why would we believe them?
Why believe anything coming out of the company’s mouth, whether we’re talking promising to crack down on misinformation or discriminatory ads or its plan to track people without personally identifying data? On what basis should anyone who does business with Facebook trust them - ever?
Will this matter in the end? Nothing has to date, even well-publicized ad boycotts or multiple Federal hearings.
Regulators are supposedly coming hard, from multiple angles. This time feels different. But how are these regulators going to get any straight answers from a company where the lying is a feature, not a bug?