Mark Zuckerberg isn’t throwing anybody under the bus. Except himself.
I designed Facebook, ‘so if someone’s going to be fired for this, it should be me’
No, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t plan to fire himself.
The Facebook CEO says that if anyone at Facebook deserves to be fired over the company’s Cambridge Analytica privacy fiasco, a major headache that’s cost the company a lot of goodwill and trust with users and regulators, it should be him.
“I think it’s a big issue, but look, I designed the platform, so if someone’s going to be fired for this, it should be me,” Zuckerberg told Recode’s Kara Swisher on this week’s Recode Decode podcast. “And I think that the important thing going forward is to make sure that we get this right.”
“But be clear, you’re not going to fire yourself right now?” Swisher joked.
“Not on this podcast right now,” Zuckerberg replied. (Sleep easy, Facebook shareholders.)
It’s unknown if anyone has been fired over the issue. Zuckerberg said back in April that no one had been fired to his knowledge, though that was three months ago. “I started this place. I run it. And I am responsible for what happens here,” he said at the time.
Zuckerberg did tell Swisher that he thought Facebook has done a good job cleaning up the Cambridge Analytica mess since it became public back in March. Facebook has done a number of things, including cutting ties with data brokers, rewriting its terms of service, and is in the middle of auditing third-party developers that had access to Facebook user data.
“This, to me, is an example of, ‘You get judged by how you deal with an issue when it comes up,’” he said. “And I think on this one, we’ve done the right things, and many of them we’ve actually done years ago to prevent this kind of situation from happening again.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
