| What's Next: Facebook on trial.
The Mark Zuckerberg hearings are only nominally about Facebook's role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. They are really about Facebook's business model, the abuse of people's privacy and the ramifications of uninhibited data collection.
The hearings should also cast a spotlight on one of the most important questions of our time: What did we give up when we gave up our data? | | | PACIFIC
Today's Agenda Good morning, and welcome to a Facebook-focused week of PACIFIC. Zuckerberg is already in Washington and meeting privately with lawmakers today ahead of this week's hearings, per a source familiar.
I'm en route to D.C. tonight by way of Sausalito, where defense experts, lawmakers and top tech lawyers are gathering for the Hewlett Foundation summit on cybersecurity. Tonight: former Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy and former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers.
What we're reading on the LAX-SFO flight: "Mark Zuckerberg Can Still Fix This Mess" by Harvard's Jonathan Zittrain. | | The Trust Crisis
Zuck on the Hill
The Agenda:
• Today: Private meetings with lawmakers.
• Tomorrow: Senate Judiciary and Commerce hearing, 2:15 p.m. ET.
• Wednesday: House Energy and Commerce hearing, 10 a.m. ET.
The Strategy, per a Facebook source:
"These are the kind of themes you'll hear from Mark":
• "Accountability: Recognize the role Facebook plays in people's lives and the need to take responsibility for what's gone wrong."
• "Owning the bigger problem: Acknowledge a failure to understand how many people were affected by these issues because we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility. As a company, we were too idealistic and optimistic and didn't focus enough on preventing abuse or thinking through how people could use the tools our platform provides to do harm."
• "Action: Highlight not just the immediate action — but more importantly Mark's commitment to look at every aspect of our relationship with people."
The Prep, via NYT's Kevin Roose, Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel:
• Facebook has "hired a team of experts, including a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, to put Mr. Zuckerberg... a cerebral coder who is uncomfortable speaking in public, through a crash course in humility and charm."
• "Facebook has hired a team from the law firm WilmerHale as well as outside consultants to coach him on questions lawmakers may ask, and on how to pace his answers and react if interrupted."
• "Facebook has also set up mock hearings involving its communications team and outside advisers who role-play members of Congress."
• "Internal staff has pushed Mr. Zuckerberg to answer lawmakers' questions directly, and not to appear overly defensive. Their goal is to make Mr. Zuckerberg appear as humble, agreeable and as forthright as possible."
What everyone is wondering but isn't saying: Will Zuckerberg sweat? The Facebook CEO has a well-known history of sweating profusely when he's under the spotlight, which adds to the perception that he's nervous or has something to hide. Like Marco Rubio with the water bottle, it's the sort of embarrassment that can become the story -- even if it shouldn't be.
Headline of the day: "Mark Zuckerberg's Washington Mission: Stay Cool in a Very Hot Seat" by WSJ's Betsy Morris. | | Political Points
What lawmakers want
Lawmakers' questions will likely run from specific inquiries about the Cambridge Analytica scandal to big picture items about Facebook's data collection and data privacy policies, as well as questions of trust.
"Meet the lawmakers who could give Zuckerberg hell," via Axios' David McCabe:
• "Members of the three committees questioning Zuckerberg will all recognize that it's the rare chance to take their Facebook criticisms straight to its founder and get the media attention that comes along with that."
• "Zuckerberg isn't just going to be interrogated about Cambridge Analytica, but about his whole business model. ... That means [he] could be grilled about a host of ills stemming from Facebook's collection and monetization of user data, going back more than a decade."
"Four questions Congress must ask Zuckerberg" by former Obama Treasury spokesperson Kara Alaimo:
• "Facebook admitted it has known since 2015 that Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed the data of its users. Why didn't Facebook make this information public at that point in time?"
• "What information should companies be required to disclose when collecting personal information about Americans on social platforms like Facebook?"
• "What will Facebook do in the future to ensure that Americans aren't deceived by information on the social network?"
• "How can Facebook help reduce political polarization in America?" | | Where this ends
The Facebook hearings are really a media story first and a policy story second. Its about the public perception of a company and its CEO, more than regulation (though some form of regulation is likely to come of all this).
So the real question for now is: Can Zuckerberg survive unscathed? | | The Big Picture
The trust deficit
"Why Zuckerberg's 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn't Fixed Facebook," by Zeynep Tufekci for Wired:
• "There is no other way to interpret Facebook's privacy invading moves over the years... as anything other than decisions driven by a combination of self-serving impulses: namely, profit motives, the structural incentives inherent to the company's business model, and the one-sided ideology of its founders and some executives."
• "There are very few other contexts in which a person would be allowed to make a series of decisions that have obviously enriched them while eroding the privacy and well-being of billions of people; to make basically the same apology for those decisions countless times over the space of just 14 years; and then to profess innocence, idealism, and complete independence from the obvious structural incentives that have shaped the whole process." | | The Latest
New initiatives, new headaches
The Good
Facebook Newsroom: "Today, Facebook is announcing a new initiative to help provide independent, credible research about the role of social media in elections, as well as democracy more generally. It will be funded by the John and Laura Arnold Foundation, Democracy Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation."
The Bad
CNBC: "Facebook suspends another data analytics firm after CNBC discovers it was using tactics like Cambridge Analytica" | | Investigating Tech
New ProPublica alum project
Sign of the Times: ProPublica's Julia Angwin tells me she and her colleague Jeff Larson are leaving ProPublica to establish a new nonprofit newsroom focused on technology-related investigations.
"We plan to scale up the work we've been doing at ProPublica with a bigger staff
of journalists and developers," Angwin wrote in an email." Our work will focus on the impact of technology on society:"
• 1. "We will investigate the technology platforms as we have done before with our probes into how Facebook enables advertisers to discriminate by religion age and race and other protected characteristics under civil rights laws.
• 2. "We will investigate the broader impacts of technology on society, as we have done with our deep dives into the racial biases of algorithms used in criminal justice and car insurance pricing.
• 3. "We will build technological tools to help us in our investigations, as we did when we built the Facebook Political Ad Collector, which is being used to shine a light on election ads in more than a dozen countries currently." | | Ride Share
Bonus: Dara in D.C.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will also be in Washington this week. He's announcing new product updates and partnerships and hosting a panel with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
New this A.M.: Uber has acquired the bike-share company Jump, which has bikes in San Francisco and Washington, via CNNMoney's Matt McFarland:
• "Khosrowshahi said in a blog post that the company wants to make multiple modes of transportation available in its app, including bicycles and subway rides."
• Financial terms were not disclosed, but TechCrunch reported earlier that the number under consideration was more than $100 million.
• Jump has 200 bikes in D.C. and wants to double that number this year. | | What Next: Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update: "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Alex Moffat) addresses calls for his resignation after Facebook mishandled user data." See you tomorrow. | | | | | |
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