There has been a lot of reaction to *that* Mark Zuckerberg piece in the Wall Street Journal last week. The Facebook CEO and founder tried to allay users’ fears about how the service uses their data. TMO’s Andrew Orr described it as “tone deaf,” which seems pretty on the money to me. Kara Swisher used her New York Times column Friday to rewrite the column and explain to readers what Zuckerberg really mean. Not surprisingly, it is funny, cutting, and well worth a read.
The post was essentially the greatest hits that we have heard Mr. Zuckerberg sing for a while now. He focused on the enormous advertising system that powers Facebook, while ignoring almost entirely the news from the last disastrous year, including Russian abuse of the platform, sloppy management of data, recent revelations that the company throws some pretty sharp elbows when it needs to, and more. You kind of get why Mr. Zuckerberg would want to forget it all.
Check It Out: What Mark Zuckerberg Really Meant in his Wall Street Journal Piece
At Facebook, we keep your data secure and would never ever sell it to anyone else, because monetizing your data by delivering eyeballs to advertisers is crucial to Facebook’s business model!!
We have absolutely no idea how Cambridge Analytica used our convenient Facebook social graph APIs to extract data on 50 million users, but how could it possibly be Facebook’s fault to believe such a respectable organization who assured us that they would never actually retain any of the data which they had extracted using the very useful Facebook APIs that we provided to them for very reasonable fees.
In one of NY’s finest epicurean establishments, specialising in rare delicacies:
Waiter: Are you ready to order madame?
KS: Yes.
Waiter: And what is madame having tonight?
KS: Facebook filet
Waiter: And how would madame like her Zuckerberg?
KS: Skewered and pit-roasted on an open flame.
That is beautiful.
Facebook would be easier to live with if they could untangle their spaghetti code. Every other blog in the world can display posts in chronological order. Oh, and let me block jerk public figures/pages.