Good Point

The good folks at El Reg make a very good point about how Facebook's recent problems may pose an existential threat, because, "No one likes a lying asshole."

Increasingly, we are seeing people looking for ways out of Facebook, and this is why:

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: Facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and its COO Sheryl Sandberg, and its public relations people, and its engineers have lied. They have lied repeatedly. They have lied exhaustively. They have lied so much they've lost track of their lies, and then lied about them.

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By any measure, Facebook as an organization has knowingly, willingly, purposefully, and repeatedly lied. And two reports this week demonstrate that the depth of its lying was even worse than we previously imagined.

Before we dig into the lies, though, it's worth asking the question: why? Why has the corporation got itself into this position, and why does it have to be dragged kicking and screaming, time and again, to confront what it already knows to be true?

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Mark Zuckerberg knows that all too well, and as internal emails handed over to the British Parliament and then published make clear, the top tier of Facebook was highly focused on that question of existential dread: how do we avoid becoming the next MySpace, Geocities, Google Plus, or Friendster?

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And the answer was the smart one: make yourself a part of the digital ecosystem. Yes, Facebook was completely reliant on its users, but everyone else wanted those users, too, and while it had them, the corporation needed to make sure it became enmeshed in as many other systems as possible.

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Facebook started cutting shadier and shadier deals to protect its bottom line. Its policy people started developing language that carefully skirted around reality; and its lawyers began working on semantic workarounds so that the Silicon Valley titan could make what looked like firm and unequivocal statements on privacy and data control, but in fact allowed things to continue on exactly as they had. What was being shared was not always completely clear.

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Well, you can do all that, and still Facebook will know where you are and sell that information to others.

To which the natural question is: how? Well, we have what we believe to be the technical answer. But the real answer is: because it lies. Because that information is valuable to it. Because that information forms the basis of mutually reinforcing data-sharing agreements with all the companies that could one day kill Facebook by simply shrugging their shoulders.

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What Zuckerberg didn't factor into his strategic masterstroke, however, was one critical detail: no one likes a liar. And when you lie repeatedly, to people's faces, you go from liar to lying asshole. And lying asshole is enough to make people delete your app.

And to think, only a year ago, people were mooting Mark Zuckerberg as a presidential candidate.