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Facebook Doesn’t Get It

Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s 2017 F8 Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif.Credit...Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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The election of Donald Trump was so shocking — and damaging to the country — that many people went looking for a scapegoat. There was a long list of candidates.

Hillary’s flawed campaign. Bernie’s long campaign. The Electoral College. The media. Sexist voters. Racist voters. Economically anxious voters. Nonvoters. James Comey. Anthony Weiner. Vladimir Putin. Twitter. And Facebook.

By spreading false news stories and giving a megaphone to Russian trolls, Facebook — a vastly larger social network than Twitter — played a meaningful role in the presidential campaign. Of course, so did many other suspects on the list. There was no single factor that allowed Trump to win. It was a confluence.

If anything, the role of Facebook and its executives has sometimes been exaggerated. “Whatever role they played surely pales in relative importance to a whole host of other factors,” Ben Thompson, the author of the Stratechery blog, pointed out yesterday (in his subscriber-only newsletter), “and it makes sense that Facebook executives would feel persecuted on that front.”

But, as Thompson explains, “The problem comes when arguing about details results in missing the big picture: fake news on Facebook may not have been the deciding factor many think it was, but Facebook’s effect on the news surely mattered.” And Facebook’s executives have indeed missed this big picture, claiming that their company played no significant role in Trump’s victory.

That’s simply wrong, and the company’s defensiveness is one reason that its image problems are becoming significant.

Facebook, as Vox’s Emily Stuart wrote yesterday, “is under siege from lawmakers, regulators, users, shareholders, and even its own employees amid revelations that Cambridge Analytics, a data analytics firm used by the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, secretly harvested personal data from 50 million of its users.”

In a 2014 speech, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., said, “In every single thing we do, we always put people first.” By that, he said he meant that Facebook would give people “control over how they share their information.”

Facebook didn’t do that.

“Where is Mark Zuckerberg?” asks Recode’s Kurt Wagner. “Facebook has dealt with these kinds of firestorms before,” Wagner writes. “But this time feels different. Users are fed up. Politicians are fed up. And investors are clearly concerned: Facebook just had its worst two-day stock performance since 2012, the year the company IPO’d. It has lost more than $50 billion off its market cap.”

“It’s time” for Zuckerberg and other top Facebook officials “to come and testify,” Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said yesterday.

Meanwhile, at the White House ... “This is depressing,” Matt Glassman of Georgetown University tweeted, referring to the story about Trump ignoring his national security advisers and cozying up to Putin on a phone call. “But boy, think about the atmosphere at the WH that leads to stuff like this leaking. Toxic.”

In The Times. Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia, is an astute observer of China, and I recommend his new op-ed on Xi Jinping.

You can join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook. I am also writing a daily email newsletter and invite you to subscribe.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion).

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