A concise overview of Mark Zuckerberg’s extensive apology tour
The appearance of Mark Zuckerberg at a Senate hearing, where he spoke about the parents of children who have been exploited, bullied, or driven to self-harm through social media, seemed like a revival of a long-standing tradition.
“I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through,” Meta’s CEO said Wednesday. “No one should have to go through what you and your family have gone through.” He then returned to corporate mode, noting Meta’s continued investment in “sector-wide” efforts to protect children.
Zuckerberg has amassed a long history of public apologies, often issued in the wake of a crisis or when Facebook users objected to unannounced — and often unappreciated — changes to its service. It’s a history that contrasts sharply with most of his tech peers, who tend not to speak publicly outside of carefully staged product introductions. But it’s also true that Facebook has simply had a lot to apologize for.
Whether or not the public always buys his apologies, there’s no doubt that Zuckerberg feels it’s important to make them himself. Here’s a quick and by no means comprehensive summary of some of Zuckerberg’s notable apologies and the circumstances that led to them.
BLINDING BETWEEN BEAF
Facebook’s first big splash in privacy involved a service called Beacon, which the platform launched in 2007. Aimed to usher in a new era of “social” advertising, Beacon tracked users’ purchases and activities on other sites and then published them in friends’ news feeds. without asking permission. After a huge backlash — well, it was huge at the time — Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post partially transcribed by TechCrunch that “we’ve made a lot of mistakes in building this feature, but we’ve made even more in the way we’ve handled them.” The lighthouse didn’t last long.
THE EARLY USERS OF FACEBOOK BREAKING
In one of the earliest Facebook founding stories, 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg taunted the roughly 4,000 students who joined his fledgling service, bragging to friends in text messages about the vast amount of personal data he had amassed under the false trust of his users. Zuckerberg called them “stupid” and delivered the word with a profanity. After Silicon Alley Insider, the predecessor of Business Insider, published those messages in 2010, Zuckerberg apologized in an interview for the New Yorker article, saying he “absolutely” regretted the remarks.
burial of federal settlements
On November 9, 2011, the Federal Trade Commission imposed stricter privacy controls on Facebook after finding that the company arbitrarily published private information without notice, did not restrict data sharing with apps when users activated restrictive settings, shared personal information with advertisers after telling them it wouldn’t, and more.
That same day, Zuckerberg published a 1,418-word essay titled “Our Commitment to the Facebook Community,” citing the FTC’s action on only its third trip and describing mistakes like Beacon’s as “a bunch of mistakes.”
VR TOUR IN THE CATALOG AREA
Zuckerberg’s interest in virtual reality long before his decision to rename the company Facebook to Meta Platforms. On October 9, 2017, he starred with a Facebook employee in a live VR tour of Puerto Rico in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The pair beamed themselves into pre-recorded 3D footage of the damage and recovery efforts; Zuckerberg described the sense of being “one of the really magical things about virtual reality,” especially since, as he put it, “it’s a really hard place to get to right now.”
He later explained Facebook’s own recovery efforts, but the dissonant video drew so many complaints that Zuckerberg issued a brief apology in a video chat, explaining that his attempts to present Facebook’s efforts in the disaster were not very clear and that he apologized to anyone who had been hurt.
CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICS
In 2018, news broke that Facebook had allowed apps to capture large amounts of data from user accounts and their friends’ accounts without oversight. While there were hundreds of apps involved, attention soon focused on one that collected data from 87 million Facebook users and passed it on to a British political data mining firm called Cambridge Analytica, which had ties to then-President Trump’s political strategist Steve Bannon. This information was reportedly used to target voters during the 2016 US presidential election campaign that led to Trump’s election.
Zuckerberg first apologized for the scandal on CNN, saying Facebook has a “responsibility” to protect its users’ data and that if it fails, “we don’t deserve the opportunity to serve people.” He offered a version of his apology in a statement to Congress later that year, saying “we didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility,” but also failures to combat fake news and hate speech, poor data protection controls. adequately address foreign interference in the 2016 election on Facebook.
