Should We sympathize With Facebook While We criticize it Severely?

Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have become one of today’s naughty children. One cannot look at news media without everyone it seems criticizing Facebook. Regulators around the world have formed a posse to get him and his company locked up or broken into pieces. National legislatures have joined the hunt. Many people are irritated that Facebook is allowing too many fake facts, misinformation, and the ability for politically destabilizing forces around the world to put democracies at risk of toppling or authoritarian rulers to clamp down on their citizens. All these charges are magnified by the fact that over a third of all people use Facebook. 

It seems a goodly portion of humanity wants to make Mr. Zuckerberg sit in the corner to punish a naughty boy. If these charges were not so serious, or if sufficiently true, picking on a T-shirt wearing CEO who named his company’s driveway Hacker Way would be amusing. Thinking of him as immature is a mistake.  These are serious charges. Are we better off temporarily taking the car keys away from him or should we try to reform him? I say, he needs a new purpose in life, while his company needs a serious makeover.

           So, how did he get into this mess? And we have to say he because he created the firm, was successful in growing it, personally ran it, and he remains its largest stockholder. So, he is responsible for whatever works, or not, at Facebook. From his early days, he positioned the firm as an outsider in society, one that had to break things, including the rules, do nearly anything to grow, to be successful, especially that he had a wonderful offering for society. You could see his attitude in the way he dressed, in the company’s slogans. Let’s move on. He was so successful so fast that one day, the world woke up and realized that he and his company were no longer outsiders. They now constituted one of the main pillars of society, one that did not look as strong and supportive as pillars of society should. Think of a Greek Temple with pillars holding up the building, now imagine Facebook as one of those pillars. 

           None of this would have mattered if Facebook had been far less successful when growing. Having a college dropout without sufficient education about subjects that soon would become relevant, let alone time over decades to develop the maturity that life’s experiences bestows on all of us, is obviously part of his problem. Eventually he came to realize that some of the criticisms needed to be addressed, so he hired antitrust lawyers, professional media consultants, and set up a quasi-court to judge if people should be banned from his platforms. These are all good moves, and time will tell if they prove useful, but the fundamentally it all seems so late. President Trump’s allies adopted Facebook into their platform of choice, which shocks the Don’s opponents around the world. Some ask, is the authoritarian genie out of the out of the bottle? In the United States, will citizens someday fall into another shooting civil war? The events of January 6, 2021 so publicized on Facebook, dare cause us to pose the question. If so Mr. Zuckerberg will have been an enabling cause. 

He stuck with operating an agnostic platform for too long. In any society a pillar must take into account needs of an entire society, not just itself. In the process, society’s pillars must prevent the hackers, it must protect the society that nurtured Facebook . Long-lived firms long understood this reality because without a healthy society and economy they could not thrive. It is not clear if Mr. Zuckerberg or his senior executives understand this obligation. His employees certainly do, as news reports of their protests and other complaints suggest. His defenses, also naiveté, are not helping him, hence why the criticisms from so many quarters.

But here is the dilemma: Facebook is too important to society and too dangerous to humanity to let it flounder. Regulators and legislators will attempt to limit the company’s influence, slap it on the wrist it with fines and taxes, possibly break off pieces, even toss a few employees in jail over the next decade. But that all takes time, people of any political stripe do not want digitized censorship, and everyone else still wants to congratulate people on their birthdays, even if they have to be abused by irrelevant advertisements and other nonsense. If you take one out, you run the risk of the building falling; better to bring in a crew to fix the weakened one.

We may be better off fixing Facebook, not just punishing it. However, get to root causes of a problem and from there you seek the path to practical fixes. I want to suggest several not being discussed then leave it to the fixers to flush out details. Mine are drawn from studying the history of successful and failed corporations over the past four decades.

First, Mr. Zuckerberg probably should be replaced; his wonderful achievements are completed. He obviously does not know how to run a huge empire, even if he is learning much on the job. Remember he owns too much of the company and majority votes on his board of directors. Government needs to force him to own way less so that his board, stocked with competent people, can create a more mature team of executives suitable for leading Facebook in what clearly is a different era for the company. I am not suggesting that his billions of dollars be taken away; he earned those.

Second, and hard to do but essential: create inside the firm a culture that reflects the values and aspirations of the markets in which Facebook serves. If those markets want fake news and misinformation stripped out of his platform, so be it. If societies want freedom of speech, great, but the courts have long ruled that freedom must be accompanied by obligations and responsibilities. They are enforced all over society in many ways, so why not also on Facebook? Societies know how to do that. I can’t yell fire in a theater when there is no fire, so one should not be able to do so on Facebook, so users also have an obligation to behave. Meanwhile, since Mr. Zuckerberg may not have taken a high school course in civics (American government), we should care because he runs Facebook.

Third, implement many of the suggestions posed in the media and by the U.S. Government, European Union and others. Slip an iron fist inside this collective glove of governmental rulings: a commitment to come down hard and quickly on Facebook if it harms the human race or the environment. For example, no pseudo medical nonsense about how to cure COVID-19, no allowing violent groups to stimulate unrest, or no authoritarian regimes to violate the UN’s rules and guidelines about humanitarian behaviors. 

It is in humanity’s collective best interests to combine discipline with helpful support to fix Facebook. Let’s discipline the naughty in Facebook and apply all that we have learned about how to create positive contributing institutions. Only then can we continue on Facebook to post pictures of our pets and grandchildren, share information and memories, buy cool stuff, allow vendors to advertise, without fearing taking the wrong medications or being mislead, let alone even of stumbling into civil wars. I like Facebook, most of you probably do too—over 2.8 billion of you subscribe to it. So let’s cure Facebook of its ills. It is time for the T-shirt culture at Facebook to grow up.