We learned this week that the data firm affiliated with Donald Trump's presidential campaign, Cambridge Analytica, acquired the Facebook data of 50 million users under shady circumstances and allegedly used it to build psychographic profiles for the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. (We also learned Cambridge is in the business of blackmail.) Facebook responded by suspending Cambridge from its platform, though it did not address why it took minimal public action—including informing millions of users their private information may have been essentially stolen—when it first found out about CA's behaviour in 2015. There was also a gaping void where the Facebook CEO might normally be, as Mark Zuckerberg disappeared into a bush, Homer-style, even skipping a meeting on the issue at Facebook.
Wednesday, we finally heard from the head honcho in the form of a lengthy Facebook post.
You may notice the words "sorry" and "apologise" do not appear, an observation that seems petty until you realize other concerns—like Facebook's 2015 secrecy about a major data breach, Equifax-style—are also unaddressed. It would appear to point to a culture of non-accountability at Facebook and in the Silicon Valley world at large. Perhaps the young tech kings of our age don't feel accountable because no one, including our elected officials, dares hold them so.
After all, Facebook (and Twitter, and Google) have scarcely begun to come to terms with their role in the 2016 election. That includes allowing the ceaseless spread of misinformation and fake news, along with the proliferation of bots and trolls to muddy the waters of the national discourse. Where The New York Times or The Washington Post were once the gatekeepers of information in American society, Facebook and Google now stand in the breach—when they're not destroying the revenue model of actual journalistic enterprises, that is.
Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.
