Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Mark Zuckerberg Has No Way Out of Facebook's Quagmire

There's simply no way to fix the fake news and data abuse problems without destroying the social network's business model.

March 21, 2018 at 5:36 PM UTC

By Leonid Bershidsky

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

He can't fix it. No one can.
Photographer: Guillermo Gutierrez/Bloomberg

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I think I understand why Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg hasn't publicly responded to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He's stuck in a catch-22. Any fix for Facebook's previous big problem -- fake news -- would make the current big problem with data harvesting worse.

As a media company and one of Americans' top sources of information, Facebook's de facto anonymity and general lack of responsibility for user-generated content make it easy for propagandists to exploit. Making matters worse, it isn't willing to impose tighter identification rules for fear of losing too many users, and it doesn't want to be held responsible in any way for content, preferring to present itself as a neutral platform. So Zuckerberg has been trying to fix the problem by showing people more material from friends and family and by prioritizing "trusted publishers" and local news sources over purveyors of fake news.