Mark Zuckerberg wasn't warned about the worst crisis in Facebook's history, and it points to something rotten in the firm's culture

After 18 months, 73 witnesses, 4,350 questions, and countless hours of evidence, British lawmakers have delivered an excoriating verdict on Facebook's year from hell.

Nowhere is this better evidenced than in Facebook's early handling of the enormous Cambridge Analytica data breach, a scandal that hobbled the company in March last year. Lawmakers were shocked at what Zuckerberg didn't know about the scandal — and said it pointed to structural issues at Facebook.

There isn't much more than this tantalizing detail, but the report was clear that several Facebook employees were aware of the Cambridge Analytica issue long before the public.

Instead, he found out about the same time as the rest of us, when Christopher Wylie blew the whistle on the affair last year in explosive interviews with The Observer and The New York Times.

Using this as a jumping-off point, the lawmakers launched into a bruising verdict on Facebook's approach to crisis management.

In the committee's 109-page report, politicians said :

A blockbuster report by The New York Times in November cast light on the way Zuckerberg had dealt with the company's missteps. It portrayed him as, at times, uninterested in some of the existential issues that have threatened Facebook over the past three years.

But the three anonymous executives' failure to flag the looming Cambridge Analytica scandal also raises questions about Facebook's reporting systems. This was also hinted at last week by the former security chief Alex Stamos, who told CNN it could be difficult for Facebook execs to admit fault.

Original article
Author: Jake Kanter

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