This week in Facebook

After starting the new year with a few largely scandal-free weeks, Mark Zuckerberg apparently decided that he was bored, or something, because the Facebook shit resumed flying fast and thick, and Gizmodo had pretty good coverage of it all.

First up: Mark Zuckerberg's thirsty op-ed, in which he opined that people didn't trust Facebook only because we don't understand them:

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published a 1,000-word screed by Mark Zuckerberg about the company’s data collecting practices titled “The Facts About Facebook.” In it, Zuckerberg makes noise about the company being about “people,” and insists—as he has been for the majority of his company’s 15-year history—that we should trust it. Zuckerberg appears to think the primary reason users have little faith in the company’s ability to responsibly or ethically handle their data is because of its targeted advertising practices, about which he writes: “This model can feel opaque, and we’re all distrustful of systems we don’t understand.” 

I guess the apology tour is over; Zuck is back to his normal, condescending self.

Gizmodo's Catie Keck goes on to list a few of the reasons why people who understand Facebook just fine also distrust Zuck & Co., starting with FB's lack of transparency, continuing on through Cambridge Analytica, and ending with their scraping and then sharing data about their users (and also about people who've never used Facebook themselves) with advertisers, and other low-lights:

In 2018, we learned that Facebook was data-sharing with other companies like Microsoft’s Bing, Spotify, Netflix, and others in exchange for more information about its users. There were also the revelations that Cambridge Analytica data-scraping was worse than we thought; that Facebook was sharing shadow contact information with advertisers; and that turning off Facebook location-sharing doesn’t stop it from tracking you. That’s obviously totally aside from the George Soros conspiracy theory fiasco; its mishandling of Myanmar genocide; and its standing as a hotbed for rampant misinformation.

As with his year-end Facebook post—which I’ll note here also largely ignored the tsunami of public relations problems the company faced last year—Zuckerberg appears to remain bafflingly optimistic about the function of his company. To be clear, this is the same founder of Facebook who once called users of his product “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their sensitive information.

Lots of links in the original article, if you missed some of those earlier "hits" when they happened.

So, not an auspicious beginning. Zuck wasn't done yet, though; not by a long shot.