When Mark Zuckerberg and some friends launched the website that grew into Facebook, they had no idea what the platform would become.
They couldn’t imagine their invention would one day be a vehicle for spreading fake news and sowing dissent, that it would become a tool for foreign actors seeking to meddle in an American election.
Fourteen years ago, Facebook’s developers couldn’t have guessed that a seemingly innocuous personality quiz would open the door to the information of 50 million Facebook users, information a firm called Cambridge Analytica would use to wage a culture war on behalf of presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.
In recent news stories, whistleblower Christopher Wylie described the company’s effort as “Nixon on steroids,” a reference to the activities of Richard M. Nixon in his 1972 re-election campaign.
Wylie said Cambridge Analytica sought to boost the Trump campaign by peeling away the supporters of Hillary Clinton. It sought to convince disheartened Bernie Sanders supporters to choose a third-party candidate or to encourage someone who had voted for Barack Obama four years earlier to just stay home.
In an interview with CNN, Zuckerberg said that if anyone had told him in 2004 he’d be trying to stave off efforts by Russian spies in 2018 he wouldn’t have believed it.
Still, it’s likely happening, he said.
“I’m sure they’re working on that,” he said, “and there are some new tactics that we need to make sure that we observe and get in front of.”
He seems confident that Facebook is up to the task.
“This isn’t rocket science, right?” he said. “And there’s a lot of hard work we have to do to make it harder for nation states like Russia to do election interference. But we can get in front of this.”
Zuckerberg acknowledges that his company should have done more when it discovered in 2015 that a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan had violated its terms of service by sharing data with Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook banned Kogan’s app and demanded that the files be deleted, but it failed to follow through.
“This was a major breach of trust, and I’m really sorry this happened,” Zuckerberg said. “We have a basic responsibility to protect people’s data.”
In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg assured users that such a breach couldn’t happen today. The rules are different, he said, and it’s no longer possible to gain information about a person’s friends without those friends also granting permission.
Still, he said, there’s more to do, “and we need to step up and do it.”
He’s right about that.
That social network that attracted so many of us to connect with friends and family members and share our stories has turned into something more like a swamp. Those cute puppy photos have given way in many instances to name calling and worse.
In his post, Zuckerberg promises to investigate every app that had access to the sort of information Cambridge Analytica was using, and he pledges to inform users of the findings.
He pledges to make it harder for developers to gain access to users’ data, and he promises more transparency in letting users know what sorts of permissions they have granted.
“I started Facebook, and at the end of the day, I’m responsible for what happens on our platform,” he writes. “I’m serious about doing what it takes to protect our community.”
The odds are he won’t be alone in that effort. Lawmakers in both the United States and Great Britain have taken an interest in the scandal, and even Zuckerberg acknowledges that some form of regulation might be in order.
Stay tuned.