Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has owned the responsibility regarding the latest data scandal, and he did so with a surprising move, a print ad.
This weekend, several newspapers in the UK and the USA came out with a full-page ad containing an apology for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and signed by Mark Zuckerberg. Such a move is a form of a nod of the digital giant to the traditional media, and symbolically even underlines the issues of today’s digital society. Somehow apologies like this simply carry more weight when you see them black on white, in physical form.
The apology owns the responsibility for protection of data after the scandal surfaced regarding Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm which obtained data on around 50 million Facebook users.
“This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time,” Zuckerberg wrote. According to CNN, the ads ran in The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal in the US, as well as in UK’s The Observer, The Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Express and Sunday Telegraph.
The whole move of course didn’t go without some witty remarks on the social networks, so for example Verge’s editor, Casey Newton, tweeted: “Finally newspapers make some real money off Facebook.”
