Facebook’s Leaders Didn’t Get It and Still Don’t
Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg’s errors stemmed from deliberate terrible choices, not naivete or good intentions gone wrong.
What we have here is a failure to lead.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Not long ago, an explanation developed about Facebook Inc.’s two-plus years of crises. The theory went that Facebook’s failures to spot foreign propaganda on the social network, to weed out viral misinformation, and to protect people’s digital information all had a common cause: Facebook’s leaders were too trusting and too optimistic to predict how the social network could be twisted and abused.
It’s time to finally kill that disingenuous explanation of Facebook’s failures. As laid bare in a New York Times article published late Wednesday, what has happened at Facebook is a failure of management, plain and simple, and that blame falls to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s top two executives. They have repeatedly apologized for all that has gone wrong at Facebook and said they take responsibility. Zuckerberg and Sandberg still haven’t received enough blame and perhaps still don’t truly accept that they created a monster.