Facebook users forgotten during Zuckerberg’s interrogation

Each week brings new twists, further media coverage and more questions than answers about Facebook.

I am changing my title at The Australian from media columnist to Facebook columnist. I have been trying, and failing, to write about anything else other than you-know-who for the past month. But each week brings new twists, further media coverage and more questions than answers.

Last week there was only one place to be and two days to be there. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made his dual appearances on Capitol Hill in front of Congress last Tuesday and Wednesday. Zuckerberg faced 600 questions over a period of 10 hours. For those of you who, perhaps wisely, did not sit through two frustratingly banal sessions, here is what happened.

First off, Facebook won. I say won, even though there is no upside of a congressional hearing. But there is always the very big threat that an appearance on the Hill can result in subsequent censure, public disdain and shareholder discomfort. Just ask the big automotive companies — Ford, General Motors and Chrysler — about their experience a decade ago when they were hauled before Congress to justify a taxpayer-funded bailout. Appearances on the Hill can have disastrous corporate implications but Facebook emerged unscathed. Perhaps even renewed.

There has been a sense of late that Facebook was a brand bouncing from scandal to scandal on a generally downward trajectory. Perhaps the hearings last week provided the pause in that descent. Investors certainly thought so. The company’s shares were up 3 per cent between the time Zuckerberg sat down on Tuesday for the first session and stood up a day later to leave after the second one. That means his two days in the chair earned him $US3 billion ($3.8bn).

The second conclusion from last week’s event was American governmental systems are in seriously bad shape. We probably did not need evidence that America is struggling with this issue but here it was again anyway. The contrast between the cool expediency of the European Union with its imminent introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation and this hastily assembled mess of Congressional infighting and ignorance was there for the world to see. When Senator Orrin Hatch asked Zuckerberg, with the flourish of a fool who thinks he has the winning poker hand because his cards add up to 21, how he intended to sustain a business model that did not charge its user for the service, even Zuckerberg’s famously taciturn stare softened in disbelief.

Zuckerberg’s response — “Senator, we run ads” — will go down as the quote of the week. Senator Hatch’s response — “I see … that’s great” — will not.

If the US government emerged looking ineffective last week, the reverse can be said of Zuckerberg. Clearly, he heads an organisation that has played fast and low with the truth and has a lot to apologise for. But it would be ignoble not to also admire the determination and strength of the man.

Only 33, he faced down questions, emerging unscathed from the experience. The Facebook narrative formerly had Zuckerberg as the dorm-room nerd who invented a platform but then needed polished Silicon Valley executives to scale, monetise and manage everything. But in Facebook’s darkest weeks those apparently experienced executives, from chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg down, evaporated, leaving Zuckerberg to stand alone. We talk a lot about leadership in Australia but I’d struggle to name one chief executive who could have performed like this, under so much pressure, for such a long period.

Zuckerberg did not exonerate Facebook last week, but he demonstrated who is, and will be, its boss. But that authority comes with a significant, perhaps ultimately disastrous cost. As cool and efficient as Zuckerberg was last week, he still managed to damage the Facebook brand — not despite this bravura performance, but because of it. If he was the head of a defence company or an artificial intelligence firm, the steely-eyed, emotionless way he batted away questions would have been entirely consistent with his company

But he runs Facebook, which — until recently — was all about community, connecting with friends and being social. The disjuncture between the isolated calculation of Facebook’s founder and the social interactivity of its users is telling.

Remember Apple founder Steve Jobs getting up on stage and being simple, brilliant, creative and advanced? He was Apple and Apple was him and the brand became magnificent at that exact moment. Consumers are now faced with an equally indelible global performance but it is one at odds with what Facebook is meant to represent to its user base. Facebook wants to stand for friends, community and fun but its brand is now synonymous with enemies, impersonal executives and spying. That’s going to be a problem.

And that is the crucial mistake Zuckerberg made last week. There was a clear sense the government is pushing him from the front, ineffectively, to make changes to Facebook. But behind him advertisers and investors clearly feel he can ride it out and Facebook will emerge intact and still integral to most big company’s advertising strategies.

But he forgot about his users. Facebook, more than most companies, is a brand. It must stand for certain things or it will lose its appeal. Then it will lose the time spent on its site, its user base, its advertisers, its share price and finally its viability.

Facebook will never change because of toothless government pressure. The only force that can influence Facebook comes from its 2.1 billion users. If these users react negatively to the data disclosures and an unemotional, unblinking Zuckerberg they will eventually move on to digital pastures new. If they do not, Zuckerberg will be vindicated because people are prepared to trade their personal data for free social media, or at least not care enough about that transaction to do anything.

My wife, hater of all things media, marketing and tech, asked me on Sunday: “If I delete Facebook from my phone, will that stop anyone seeing pictures of our daughter.” I did not know the answer, but the question itself was much more important than anything Zuckerberg was asked.