Sheryl Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook – second in command. She first became known outside geeksville for her book urging women to have the confidence to do better at work and get into positions of leadership – Lean In. Check out the video below. Rather less happily, she was widowed suddenly and her next book was about surviving such a terrible blow.
She is very bright, coherent and a terrific communicator. All of which put her in a very bad light regarding the shameful shenanigans at Facebook. She has no excuse.
So here we are with this super brainy woman who kept her mouth shut, like her boss and FB co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, for five days after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. And what does Ms Sandberg say in an interview with the Financial Times?
That she’s sorry – mistakes were made and they are on her. That Facebook still doesn’t know what data Cambridge Analytica has. That her company had underinvested in the safety and security of people’s data.
What? This isn’t about pushing someone over in the playground. Or coming clean before she was absolutely forced to. This is about helping a Narcissistic maniac who has never held public office become President of the US and much other mischief, setting people against others all over the world.
Looting data and allowing others to do the same is how Facebook got so big and so rich so fast. It’s motto is “move fast and break things” – until called to account it didn’t seem to care that that included democracy, on both sides of the Atlantic – we are a long way from fully understanding the level of interference in the Brexit referendum.
I don’t buy Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s naivety that they didn’t grasp the implications of the monster they built. I think they didn’t care while they were raking in billions of advertising dollars. Don’t forget that in 2004 Zuckerberg described those 4,000 Harvard students who had handed over their data to him right at the start of what became Facebook “Dumb Fucks” for trusting him with it. How right he was.
Shamefacedness isn’t something Zuckerberg or his deputy know how to do. Still as Groucho Marks remarked, “Sincerity is the secret of success. Once you can fake that, you’re on your way”. And they’ve both had years of describing what FB does as being for the good of humanity with a straight face.
I have a terrible fear that once the hoo-ha is over, it will be business as usual. I hope not, but I cannot see FB will change its business model or operations in any significant way. I also cannot see that the two people most responsible for creating this rampaging monster are the best ones to try and tame it. #DeleteFacebook. You can live without it. Honest.
The Persistent Woman 