Tech Bro Translator: Zuckerberg's 935-word non-apology apology

After five long days of silence, Mark Zuckerberg has finally spoken about the ongoing Cambridge Analytica revelations.

In a nearly 1,000-word-long Facebook post, the firm’s co-founder went to great lengths to explain how he’d already fixed all the problems that led to the unauthorised use of data from 50 million Americans by a political consultancy working for Donald Trump. What he doesn’t get around to doing, however, is actually apologising for the leak.

You can read Zuck’s statement here, but to work out what he’s really saying we ran the entire statement through our our Tech Bro Translator.

Zuck’s use of “I want to share an update” is fairly liberal here, given that he’d already waited until five days after the Cambridge Analytica news broke to actually give this statement. If he’d really wanted to share an update, he might have done it a little sooner.

Facebook does have a huge responsibility over its users’ data. It’s the firm’s lifeblood, and a large part of the reason why it managed to rack up $39.9 billion dollars in advertising revenue over the last year.

Here, Zuck seems to be telling us that he’s already fixed the problem. Now, I don’t want to call bullshit on this exactly, but something about this whole situation is hinting to me that everything hasn’t quite been resolved.

There’s a lot going on here so let’s break it down. Firstly, it appears that Zuck seems to be getting news about his own company from journalists, rather than internal investigations, which is a tad worrying. Secondly, Facebook tries to sound a little tough here by saying it “demanded” that the data was deleted, but all that really seems to mean is that they asked, perhaps a little forcefully, and, surprise surprise, the people who had misused the data said “yep, we’ve got rid of it!”. I can see absolutely no way in which this would go wrong.

It’s hard to know who really believes in Facebook’s mission, so presumably this is directed mostly at Facebook staff, and maybe a few investors too. Facebook’s mission (which it just updated in 2017), by the way, is to “bring the world closer together.” It's fair to say that over the last five days, Zuck has done exactly that, but perhaps not in the way he’d like.