Stop me if you've heard this one...

Under pressure over the NY Times' bombshell story detailing Facebook's own campaign of anti-Semitic disinformation which they pursued in order to deflect criticism over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mark Zuckerberg offered a truly defense in response. In essence, he claimed:

1. the everybody knew that Facebook had employed Definers Media (i.e. nothing to see here);
2. that he himself didn't know that Facebook was employing Definers (i.e. it wasn't me);
3. that an un-named comms staffer had actually decided key details of Facebook's damage-control/PR strategy, apparently without anyone signing off on it (this, after testifying before Congress about how he "took full responsibility for" exactly this sort of decision-making at Facebook); and
4. that Facebook had now cut ties with Definers, literally yesterday (i.e. now that we all know about their shady business, they'd like to be seen doing a right thing).

As reported by Gizmodo:

Today, Facebook set up a press conference addressing a bombshell report from The New York Times that alleged, among other things, that the company contracted a Republican opposition research firm called Definers to run interference on the company’s image, a job which reportedly included leaning on George Soros conspiracy theories.

On the call, Mark Zuckerberg claimed he only found out the group was working for Facebook yesterday—which would mean the CEO learned about his company’s dealings well after most reporters.

Facebook ended its relationship with Definers yesterday, following backlash from the public as well as from the president of the Open Societies Foundation: one of the groups run by Soros, who has been a frequent target of anti-semitic conspiracy theories. In the wake of that abrupt dismissal, Facebook published a rebuttal which included the following statement:

Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media – not least because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of journalists about important press calls on our behalf.

“Me personally, I didn’t know we were working with them,” Zuckerberg said during today’s Q&A. [...] Who would have known or approved of such a relationship? Zuckerberg, who previously stated that personnel matters are outside the purview of public disclosure, pinned the blame on “someone on our comms team.”

At this point, I can't help but wonder if anyone in Facebook's senior leadership had any idea what ethics even are. They've certainly behaved with reckless disregard for the truth, and utter contempt for the consequences of their decisions, with such consistency and for so long that I can no longer believe anything that they say without supporting documentation. Zuckerberg, personally, has done almost nothing but hide the truth and deflect criticism, all while espousing his own commitment to transparency, love of facts, and personal qualities of responsible leadership. The extent of the cynical hypocrisy on display here is simply breathtaking.

And I'm far from being the only person who's not buying it anymore.

The NY Times also covered this same conference call:

The call quickly went sideways. For more than an hour, the 34-year-old billionaire instead fielded questions about how he and his No. 2, Sheryl Sandberg, obfuscated problems such as Russian interference on Facebook and how the company had gone on the attack against rivals and critics. In response, Mr. Zuckerberg — at times defiant and at times conciliatory — defended the social network, Ms. Sandberg and his own record.

[...]

Yet even as Mr. Zuckerberg was making his case, a furor against his company was gathering momentum.

In Washington, Republicans and Democrats threatened to restrain Facebook through competition laws and to open investigations into possible campaign finance violations. Shareholders ramped up calls to oust Mr. Zuckerberg as Facebook’s chairman. And activists filed a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission about the social network’s privacy policies and condemned Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer, for overseeing a campaign to secretly attack opponents.

[...]

“Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate itself,” said Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the House antitrust subcommittee. “This staggering report makes clear that Facebook executives will always put their massive profits ahead of the interests of their customers.”

"Facebook cannot be trusted" seems to be the theme of the response from pretty much all corners. Advertisers and investors are also rapidly losing what little confidence they have left in Zuckerberg's team, which could have significant long-term consequences for Facebook's business. For the reaction from FB shareholders, of course, we need look no further that FB's share price, which is down again.

For a taste of the reaction from advertisers, we can again look to the NY Times:

Advertisers are the financial engine of Facebook, but lately the relationship had gotten rocky.

It got rockier on Thursday.

Several top marketers were openly critical of the tech giant, a day after The New York Times published an investigation detailing how Facebook’s top executives — Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg — made the company’s growth a priority while ignoring and hiding warning signs over how its data and power were being exploited to disrupt elections and spread toxic content. The article also spotlighted a lobbying campaign overseen by Ms. Sandberg, who also oversees advertising, that sought to shift public anger to Facebook’s critics and rival tech firms.

The revelations may be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” said Rishad Tobaccowala, chief growth officer for the Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s biggest ad companies. “Now we know Facebook will do whatever it takes to make money. They have absolutely no morals.”

[...]

“Up to now, whatever you said about Facebook, you couldn’t say it was a two-faced company,” said Rishad Tobaccowala, chief growth officer for the Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s biggest advertising groups.

But now it is clear that “it says one thing to you and does something completely different,” Mr. Tobaccowala said. “This is very hard if you are a marketer.”

That giant corporations will do whatever it takes to make money, ethics and morals be damned, is hardly a new sentiment, but it's obviously never a good thing to have the tone of public discussion shift from how powerful and profitably FB are, to how recklessly amoral FB and its leaders are, corporately and personally.

With all of this negativity swirling, it should probably surprise nobody that morale at Facebook is also at a low ebb, as reported by Bloomberg:

Most discussion at Facebook happens on the company’s workplace version of the social network, in various company groups. But when the news is about Facebook’s leadership, some employees have found it easier to talk when they’re unnamed. They used Blind, the anonymous employee chat app, to raise their concerns, according to screenshots obtained by Bloomberg. On Thursday, the conversations were full of outrage. How could Sandberg – and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg – have failed to see the threat to the company? And how could they have managed all of this so poorly?

“Why does our company suck at having a moral compass?” one employee asked, in a message linked to the New York Times story.

“Zuckerberg defers too much to others on issues where he needs to make a call,’’ another said, also anonymously, in the same thread.

“I’m f-ing exhausted of cleaning up after the sloppy and careless mistakes that made so many of the people responsible for them so, so rich,” said a third.

By all means, let's never forget how very, very rich Zuckerberg has become as a result of his utterly amoral tactics.

I'm no big fan of Amazon or Jeff Besos; their HQ2 "competition," which resulted in Amazon squeezing concessions and tax breaks out of the two cities where Besos already owned homes, and where he clearly always intended to put his other offices, is some extremely shady shit, and has earned Amazon some well-earned backlash of their very own. But Amazon are not Facebook; greedy and monopolistic as they are, Jeff Besos has never descended to the same petty, amoral depths that we now know Zuckerberg and Sandberg occupy.

Google may sell advertising, and may collect users' personal data in the process, but nothing that Google has ever done is remotely comparable to Facebook's fiasco. In sharp contrast, the corporate culture of "don't be evil" is clearly alive and well with the rank and file of the company, and they've proven themselves willing and able to hold their leaders accountable... and to force those leaders to change course, when they appeared to be going astray. Googlers killed the company's involvement with Project Maven, the military AI program. Googlers forced the company to change their sexual harassment policy, a shift caused which other tech companies to quickly follow suit.

Even Microsoft, who I've frequently taken to task for monopolistic bullshit, look like paragons of transparency and morality by comparison with Zuckerberg & co. Facebook's attempts to smear Amazon, Apple, and Google as being essentially no different than FB themselves is a bald-faced lie, and Mark Zuckerberg is a bald-faced liar. When he asserted in his damage-control conference call that hiding the truth or spreading disinformation simply wasn't how Facebook did things, in spite of the fact that they'd just be caught doing exactly those things, it earned the correct response: scorn.

I don't care what Mark Zuckerberg says anymore, and neither should you. Collectively, Facebook and its leadership are utterly without honour; their words are worthless, and you should ignore them. Instead, watch what they do. And then do what you feel is the right thing to do, in response.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#deleteFacebook

UPDATED: Nov. 21st

Gizmodo just posted what has to be my favourite take on Zuckerberg's non-response to this latest scandal. Starting with calling it an "oopsie," they then continue:

Just like after the Cambridge Analytica mess, this appears to have been enough for Facebook to once again program Zuckerberg with the company’s latest talking points and send him out to speak on TV.

[...]

In other words, you can trust Mark Zuckerberg or you can trust the New York Times. But while making your decision, perhaps keep in mind that one of these choices is desperate to preserve a multi-billion-dollar company’s business model amid a precipitous plunge in its stock prices, while the other is a 167-year-old newspaper whose coverage has won 125 Pulitzer Prizes. Oh, and that Zuckerberg’s defense against the Definers thing was that he wasn’t actually aware what was going on until after those reporters.

#Zuckerbot

In all seriousness, though... with the prevailing tone of the coverage describing Zuckerberg as good-but-clueless, and blaming Sheryl Sandberg with everything that's going wrong with Facebook in the past year as if she was the Wicked Witch of the West, or something, it's good to see that some of the media aren't being taken in by their no-cop/bad-cop act.