POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

What follows is the lead item in last night’s Overnight Technology newsletter from The Hill:

Highlights from Zuckerberg’s Interviews:

CNN: Zuckerberg said the company was open to some regulation.

“Actually, I’m not sure we shouldn’t be regulated.”

“I actually think the question is more ‘What is the right regulation?’ rather than ‘Yes or no, should it be regulated?'”

—Note: Facebook also spent a company-record $11.5 million in 2017 on lobbying, including pushing back on regulations.

Wired: “Our job is to get the government and Congress as much information as we can about anything that we know so they have a full picture, across companies, across the intelligence community, they can put that together and do what they need to do. So, if it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that.”

Recode: “I think we let the community down, and I feel really bad and I’m sorry about that. So that’s why we’re going to go and do these broad audits.”

The New York Times: “If you had asked me, when I got started with Facebook, if one of the central things I’d need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in each other’s elections, there’s no way I thought that’s what I’d be doing, if we talked in 2004 in my dorm room.”

“I don’t know that it’s possible to know every issue that you’re going to face down the road. But we have a real responsibility to take all these issues seriously as they come up, and work with experts and people around the world to make sure we solve them, and do a good job for our community.”

Here are five takeaways from the media blitz:

Facebook may accept regulation

Zuckerberg doesn’t want to testify

Facebook is worried about the controversy — and should be

More scrutiny is coming for Facebook apps

Zuckerberg hasn’t come clean yet about data mining

Details on each here.

 

What has struck me about all of this attention to Zuckerberg’s evasive non-answers to reporters’ questions, uttered against the backdrop of the sudden and rather unprecedented drop in Facebook’s stock price, is that after Trump’s election, Zuckerberg was speculatively included in almost every early list of potential Trump opponents in 2020. He was the chichi possibility before the prospect of an Oprah candidacy pushed him and just about everyone else to the wings on the stage of celebrity political possibilities. The speculation about Zuckerberg had been fueled by a cross-country trip that he undertook last summer, a trip that was advertised as including a visit to every one of the 50 states. Of course, Zuckerberg denied that he had any national political ambitions and asserted that the trip was simply an effort to gauge the role of Facebook in its users’ lives and in shaping their interests and opinions. In short, he was already trying to head off the issues about how Facebook was manipulated in the 2016 election. His failure to do so decisively has, of course, led to the current damaging attention to Facebook’s business model, to its turning its users’ personal information into the main commodity that it sells, and to its failure to anticipate and constrain the potentially nefarious exploitation of that information and its platform.

Indeed, if Zuckerberg were to run for president, one of the major issues that he would have to address would be the decided advantage that his insider’s knowledge of Facebook’s potential to reach and to shape voters’ attitudes would give him over almost any of his political opponents. So, in very short order, the very thing that made him seem a very attractive, if unconventional, presidential candidate—his technocratic success in creating Facebook—has suddenly become a very large, if not insurmountable political liability.

A #deletefacebook movement is getting the sort of attention that can potentially undermine Facebook—and as Zuckerberg himself has acknowledge, users’ confidence in Facebook and their enthusiasm about using it. The following is from a short article written by James Cook for Business Insider:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a new interview that the “#deletefacebook” social media campaign is “not good” for his company — but that it hasn’t yet damaged Facebook.

“#deletefacebook” has been a popular hashtag on Twitter since The Observer and The New York Times reported that British political data science firm Cambridge Analytica managed to harvest the data of 50 million Facebook users.

The New York Times asked Zuckerberg whether he’s worried about the movement, and whether Facebook is seeing a meaningful number of people deleting their accounts because of it.

“I don’t think we’ve seen a meaningful number of people act on that,” Zuckerberg said. “But, you know, it’s not good.” . . .

“I think it’s a clear signal that this is a major trust issue for people, and I understand that. And whether people delete their app over it or just don’t feel good about using Facebook, that’s a big issue that I think we have a responsibility to rectify.”

 

In August 2017, Nick Bilton wrote a report for Vanity Fair on Zuckerberg’s nationwide odyssey. It’s hard to read it now as one would have read it not much more than half a year ago:

No one really has the faintest clue what Zuckerberg is up to, which all amounts to fairly genius politicking for a political neophyte. Mike Pence, in fact, might want to give it a try.

I have my own theory as to what’s going on here. Over the years, I’ve spent some time with Zuckerberg, and I always got the feeling that he truly believed there wasn’t a problem that technology couldn’t solve. He felt deeply, and likely still does, that he was using Facebook to connect people, and that those connections were making the world a better place.

Lately, however, it appears that he has realized that there is another darker side to all of this technology. That the opioid epidemic has grown because of the Internet, that sites like Twitter enable people to spew hatred and lie without repercussions, and—most importantly—that his very own Web site was used by Russian hackers and idiot bros in the Midwest to share fake news stories that helped give us President Trump.

Zuckerberg may have ascended to prominence as a brilliant technologist, but he has turned Facebook into a behemoth because he is also a generationally gifted chief executive, someone who tends to think 20 steps ahead. In fact, I’ve never met a C.E.O. who can do this with such adroitness. I’m sure that the possibility of public office has crossed Zuckerberg’s mind, but probably for a reason that none of us have thought of, and it may also be 19 steps down the line. I don’t think he’s going to be on the ballot for 2020, but I do think he has left the option open to run for office one day. . . .

But there’s something else I’ve come to believe about Zuckerberg over the past several months. As his surrogates have said to me, he partially wants to do this tour of America to show he’s just like us, and in touch with how Facebook (and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) can affect people. Unfortunately, though, I think his expedition has had the opposite effect, and highlighted just how out of touch Zuckerberg really is with the rest of the country. While he can plan 20 moves ahead, he can’t seem to understand that cavorting around the country with a professional photographer, snapping disingenuous images of him milking cows, touring shrimp boats in the Bayou, and having dinner with a lovely family in Ohio, seems aloof or, worse, patronizing. I have some advice for Zuckerberg: fire your photographer. If you want to post a picture of yourself at dinner in Ohio, take a selfie like everyone else on the planet.

Zuckerberg’s greatest challenge, after all, is that his profound wealth and success have made it far harder to understand what aggrieves most Americans. They aren’t just worried about what Trump will do to our country—or whether our planet is overheating, or if we’re playing a short-sighted game of chicken with the North Koreans, or if the Democrats (or Republicans) have any viable alternatives—but they are also worried about how they will be able to pay for their kids to go to college, or for winter clothes, or, in some cases, for the very next meal. And yet, at the same time, his skills and

experience have put him in a rare position to remedy so much of what ails us. As he evidenced at Harvard, Zuckerberg appears aware of these existential fears. But the big question that hangs over his head—and its the one that will determine not only whether he could win elected office, but also what kind of company Facebook becomes—is whether he can solve them. And if Zuckerberg’s actions say anything, that is exactly what he’s thinking about right now.

 

Cook’s complete article is available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-worried-by-deletefacebook-movement-2018-3?nr.

Bilton’s complete article is available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/mark-zuckerberg-political-ambitions-are-grander-than-you-think.