WASHINGTON - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is apologizing - again. In his remarksprepared for Wednesday's House Energy and Commerce Committee, in advance of his turn in the hot seat following revelations about the misuse of Facebook user data, Zuckerberg said "we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here."
Communication and leadership experts said that clearly worded part of his testimony may have taken the right approach. They also said it could have trouble breaking through because of how many times Zuckerberg has said "sorry" for privacy-related mishaps in the past.
"When an apology keeps being issued over and over and a transgression keeps being repeated, the apology comes to have less meaning and less impact," said Gabrielle Adams, a professor at the University of Virginia's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. "When over and over [Facebook] keeps doing things that infringe on user privacy, at some point apologies become empty words."
For more than a decade, after all, Zuckerberg has issued a series of mea culpas, commitments to do better and promises to learn from Facebook's mistakes, often related to privacy or user data. Back in 2003, after creating Facemash, a "hot-or not" site that went viral at Harvard and was Facebook's predecessor, Zuckerberg said "this is not how I meant for things to go and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect." After it launched Beacon in 2007, sharing data with advertisers in outside web sites and apps, he said "we simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. ... People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share."
When reporters spotted a privacy loophole in 2010, Zuckerberg promised to "add privacy controls that are much simpler to use," and he said "I'm the first to admit that we've made a bunch of mistakes" after Facebook reached a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission.
And all of that preceded the recent round of explanations and promises after questions arose about its role in the 2016 election and after initial details emerged regarding the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvesting user data without permission.
"We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward," Zuckerberg said in March.
That rinse-and-repeat pattern to Zuckerberg's apologies hasn't gone unnoticed, whether on Twitter, in media coverage or by those raising alarm bells about Facebook's influence. As University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill professor and "techno-sociologist" Zeynep Tufecki wrote in Wired last week, "the constant repetition of 'sorry' and 'we meant well" and 'we will fix it this time!' to refer to what is basically the same betrayal over 14 years should no longer be accepted as a promise to do better, but should instead be seen as but one symptom of a profound crisis of accountability." (An email to a Facebook spokesperson Monday afternoon was not immediately returned.)
Those who study CEO apologies say that the repeat nature of Zuckerberg's apologies - even if the scope or impact of the problem has varied - could erode their power.
"When something is part of a routine or normative, what happens is it loses much of its significance," said Amy Ebesu Hubbard, the department chair of communicology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, who has studied apologies.
"Think about how our brain works. If we're learning to drive, the first time it takes all our cognitive resources. But after a while when it's routine, we don't think about it," she said. "When someone apologizes repeatedly, it's the same thing. In order to be seen as not being a platitude, you have to do something different to shed new light or have a deeper insight."
She said there are two key parts to being forgiven: The first is offering a forthright apology, but the second is making sure the recipient feels empathetic toward you. People, she said, have to feel bad for you, and "that entails recognizing that you realize the severity of the damage." When a leader is repeatedly apologizing, she said, "it calls into question your apology - was it really sincere?"
Paul Argenti, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business who studies corporate communication strategy, compared it to a relationship.
"If you do something wrong and say you're sorry - whether you don't take the garbage out or cheat on your partner - You might get another shot," he said. "Do it three times and it's time for a divorce."
How Zuckerberg's mea culpa will play in this week's hearings is not yet clear - he'll be drilled by lawmakers, and the apology could get lost in his responses about third-party developers, verified accounts and APIs. One suggestion, Adams offered, is to position Facebook's mistakes more in the moral terms that so many users see them.
"His apologies, in and of themselves, are not bad, but they're often defensive," she said.
Academics who study such communication patterns, she said, tend to divide transgressions into one of two types: Those of competence (not communicating something well; an employee error) and those of integrity (doing something people generally disagree with on a moral basis), and Zuckerberg can mix the two in his apologies.
"He tends to frame the mistake as a lack of communication and transparency, but what it comes down to is users are not OK with their data being shared," she said. "People see privacy as a moral issue."
- The Washington Post.
