Editor’s note: This story appears in full in The Washington Post. An excerpt is posted below.
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In her column, Jena McGregor writes that “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is apologizing—again. In his remarks prepared for Wednesday’s [U.S.] House Energy and Commerce Committee meeting [April 11], 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.’”
[Gabrielle Adams, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Psychology at Batten, has studied resolving interpersonal transgressions through offender punishment, victim compensation, apologies, and forgiveness.]
“His apologies, in and of themselves, are not bad, but they’re often defensive,” she said.
“He tends to frame the mistake as a lack of communication and transparency, but what it comes down to is users are not okay with their data being shared,” she said. “People see privacy as a moral issue.”
Mark Zuckerberg (2014 photo courtesy of WikiMedia.)
