Mark Zuckerberg’s joke was a slap in the face of Facebook’s victims

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Most awkward Zuck moments revolve around the CEO’s inability to exhibit human emotion. This one comes with a serving of insult, added to injury.

Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference on Tuesday with a manifesto-ish address about how the future of Facebook is focused on privacy. 

Through encrypting messaging, focusing on ephemerality, and other measures, the company that invented putting your life online says it is fundamentally changing the company to ensure that its users’ private lives, opinions, and interactions stay private.

Yep, soak that in. If you find the assertion that Facebook is a privacy company now pretty rich, you are certainly not alone.

Zuckerberg was not blind to the skepticism with which many greeted his announcement. But the way he chose to acknowledge the icky irony of the situation was just, well… watch for yourself.

Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the bad rap his company has for how it treats its users data and privacy with a supremely uncomfortable joke, and forced laugh. The audience responded with silence.

“I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly,” Mark Zuckerberg joked, amid some understated snorty laughs. Not even the audience — packed with Facebook employees and developers — could muster a laugh.

Put aside, for one moment, the obvious cringey-ness of watching Mark Zuckerberg, human person, try to crack a joke about, say, the fact that his company is about to pay billions in fines for mishandling user data, to give just one example. Instead, let us try to understand. See, what Mark is doing here is employing a little comedic technique called understatement. Do you get it? Facebook’s reputation on privacy — from the amount of data it soaks up on its users to sell us things, to the lack of care with which it treats our private information — is so much worse than not “the strongest.” So it’s a joke!!!

Beyond the awkwardness, silence from the crowd was what this joke deserved. 

Consider just the last 6 weeks in Facebook’s legacy of protecting its users’ privacy. In March, Facebook admitted to storing millions of its users’ Facebook passwords in plaintext for employees to see. In April, it expanded that mistake to include Instagram passwords. And, also in April, it acknowledged that it had mistakenly scraped the emails of 1.5 million of its users. That’s just the recent news. Ok, fine, let’s also mention the breach Facebook acknowledged in September 2018 that put the private data of 30 million of its users into the hands of hackers. Or, hey, let’s throw in that pesky Cambridge Analytica situation, in which one rogue developer was able to scrape and sell the data of 87 million Facebook users to people seeking to manipulate the US election.

Perhaps Zuckerberg’s PR coaches told him a little lighthearted levity was what the situation called for? The laugh was so uncomfortable and forced it certainly seemed that way. 

Is this what Facebook’s humility, as it attempts to earn back our trust and convince us it really is changing, looks like? If so, it just isn’t funny.