The Pandemic Is Giving Zuckerberg a Shot at Making Amends

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- For the past two years, Facebook Inc. and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg were the public face of the “techlash,” a feeling among some in the general population and in government that tech companies were too big and occasionally damaging to society. Zuckerberg stayed on the defensive, apologizing to Congress for Facebook’s leaking of private data on millions of users and vowing to do a better job of rooting out misinformation and protecting elections from foreign meddling.

Then came Covid-19. And Facebook was suddenly no longer tripping over its mistakes—it was on the offense, using lessons learned from past failures. After being heavily criticized for Russian interference in the last presidential campaign and the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Facebook moved quickly to get its teams preparing for bad things that could happen, instead of waiting for the media to dig them up. They expected to find a challenge similar to Russian election interference. Instead, they face a worldwide public-health disaster.

The virus and its associated lockdowns have made Facebook’s products necessary societal infrastructure for its 2.89 billion users trying to communicate and learn how to protect themselves while at home. The company news feed prompts once used to assuage privacy concerns now broadcast health and safety information from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Product engineers have quickly reorganized into new teams to better support services under more pressure amid record usage, such as live video.

As a result, Zuckerberg has become one of the most visible CEOs of the coronavirus outbreak, giving him a chance to change the conversation about Facebook. The 35-year-old co-founder has long sought to play a bigger role in solving the world’s problems, prompting a headline-grabbing national tour in 2017 that raised suspicions of political ambitions.

While Zuckerberg has often come off as supercilious or aloof, such as in lengthy congressional hearings or an appearance at Georgetown University this year to defend free speech, people are tuning in to hear what he has to say. He’s used Facebook to livestream interviews with California Governor Gavin Newsom and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with his wife, Priscilla Chan—a pediatrician and head of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative—at his side.

The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s philanthropic investment organization, has given Facebook a front-line look at the unfolding pandemic. Zuckerberg was getting early warnings from the health experts he’d hired for the initiative, including Joe Derisi, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco, and Tom Frieden, a former CDC director.

In late January, based on their advice, Zuckerberg told Facebook’s senior leaders to prepare for Covid‑19 to change the way they do business. “He was very cleareyed about what this all meant, well ahead of what anybody within Facebook—and what folks other than the real expert epidemiologists—thought,” says Nick Clegg, vice president for public affairs. “Like many other people in the room, I was thinking, Is this real, is it really going to be that dramatic? Is society going to slow down that abruptly?”

At the end of February, Zuckerberg received an email from Frieden saying the virus hadn’t been contained, confirming everyone’s worst fears. Zuckerberg called for a meeting with senior leadership to start putting plans into action, then wrote a long memo for the whole company in early March. He detailed how the novel coronavirus was likely to affect all aspects of operations, from small advertisers that would go out of business to the strain on Facebook’s infrastructure, as well as how the company needed to reorient itself around supporting the virus response. Employees rallied around their leader, with attendance at his weekly staff meetings at record levels, according to the company.

Zuckerberg has sometimes faced criticism for his ironclad control of Facebook, though he’s backed by his board, which feels the co-founder is best placed to make tough decisions, especially in uncertain times. Covid-19 may present the clearest example of Zuckerberg’s leadership under pressure since he refused to sell Facebook to Yahoo Inc. for $1 billion in 2006. Still, it will take more than a bravura performance in a crisis to overcome the mistrust generated by past behavior. Facebook’s ability to do good in crisis comes from its massive size—but growing that big involved missteps and blind spots that will remain after a pandemic.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.