Most wealthy and influential people hardly see the need to say that they are sorry for their gaffes and goofs. But not Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. He had to face serious questions about the 50 million Facebook user profiles which were believed to have been used improperly to affect the 2016 American presidential election.
The young billionaire buckled under pressure. Zuckerberg realized that the media wanted to get to the root of the matter. He said he was sorry that the data mix-up happened, an admission that delighted US communications professionals. It dawned on him that as the Chief executive of a company that boasts of over two billion active users globally, he ought to be more discreet. In the chat with the media, Zuckerberg felt really sober for apparently being trapped by conspirators.
He blurted out, “If you told me in 2004, when I was getting started with Facebook, that a big part of my responsibility today would be to help protect the integrity of elections against interference by other governments, you know, I wouldn’t have really believed that.” He was referring to his experience in Harvard as well as to the perceived use of Facebook by Russian authorities to manipulate the polls to favor Donald Trump.
It is believed that Cambridge Analytica’s tools were also used by the Trump campaign to target voters. While the effectiveness of these tools is difficult to determine, the company’s own executives believe them to have been vastly influential. “We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow,” one Cambridge Analytica executive boasted, “give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape.”
