Facebook is staring down the barrel of impending regulation. It’s being called to public account for Russian meddling in last year’s election. People are describing its algorithm-driving News Feed as a Frankenstein-like monster that even its creators can’t control. This didn’t stop Mark Zuckerberg from ticking off more events on the Zuckerberg Tour 2017, his 50-state visiting blitz. On September 24, he headed to Philadelphia for a cheesesteak at the original Pat’s King of Steaks, a photo opp that received 191,000 likes when published on his Facebook page. Just before South Philly, he met with students in Virginia and Kentucky. He has six more stops planned before the Thanksgiving holidays, according to a recent Bloomberg cover story, in which he explained, “People trust people, not institutions.”
He’s right. Trust in institutions is collapsing. This is a fundamental shift in American culture that the internet has kicked into overdrive. The Edelman Trust Barometer has surveyed tens of thousands of people annually for 17 years about their level of trust in business, media, government, and nongovermental organizations. This year, for the first time, the survey revealed that trust had fallen across all four institutions.
Absent the institutions on which we have depended, we are putting our trust in people we know, or at least people we think or feel we know. We stay in strangers’ homes on Airbnb. We buy Everlane shoes because our favorite Instagram star wears them. Actual celebrities have become our new authorities. Oprah has the last word on spirituality. Our current President built his brand on a TV show.
Zuckerberg intuited this shift earlier than most. He built a service to advance the emerging idea that people are to be trusted over institutions. By its nature, Facebook elevates individuals while deprecating institutions. Individuals are the atoms, connecting to one another to spread information. Institutions get “pages,” which can be liked and shared—or ignored—by those people. Facebook’s role in society has been to transfer to individuals many of the activities, like recommending news articles, that used to reside with institutions.
Zuckerberg understood that for Facebook to work, its users needed to trust it. But at its founding in 2004, people were already beginning to trust businesses less, particularly larger ones. Facebook would need a relatable individual to be a stand-in for the company—a recognizable, authentic voice who users felt they knew. A “friend.” It would need a Zuckerberg.
So far, this strategy has worked well. Facebook’s earliest users were, like Zuckerberg, American Ivy Leaguers interested in the service for similar things (dating, posting drunk selfies, dating). Its problems were comparably narrow, and when it clashed with users—which usually happened when it overstepped in introducing new services and users feared they were ceding too much control of personal information—Zuckerberg could speak to them directly. The first such letter I remember arrived in September 2006, just after Facebook launched the News Feed. “We really messed this one up,” it began. He explained himself and asked for forgiveness—and people embraced it. This strategy, as New York Times reporter Farhad Manjoo points out, worked over and over again. Zuckerberg’s apologies and explanations usually achieved their aim: Facebookers forgave Zuckerberg, er, Facebook, or at least continued to use its service.
As Facebook has grown into an international business that has put its CEO in the same league with world leaders, Zuckerberg has used his Facebook profile to craft and control an image of himself as an approachable and empathetic everyman. This is a significant operation. Inside Facebook, a communications team reviews and often ghostwrites most of these posts. A photographer travels with Zuckerberg to chronicle his endeavors. Over the years, his personal profile has grown a readership the size of a glossy magazine. It has close to a hundred million followers, or nearly 100 the circulation of The New Yorker. Most of his status updates receive between 150,000 and 200,000 likes and thousands of comments and shares. They include updates on his annual personal challenges, and press release-style blog posts on company developments. But they also includes candid family shots, often intended to confer advice and sell Facebook at the same time as they give us a peek into his personal life. (In the caption of a shot of his daughter, Max, and dog, Beast, for example, he notes that studies show when working parents take time to be with newborns, it’s good for the entire family; he then details Facebook’s parental leave policies.)
In light of this, the recent Washington Post report that then-President Barack Obama had made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of disinformation seriously is significant. It implies that Zuckerberg wasn’t being straight with us. In the days that followed Trump’s election, Zuckerberg used the stage at the Techonomy conference to deny Facebook could have had a hand in the election’s outcome. Only now, we learn that 10 days after Zuckerberg’s Techonomy appearance, Obama warned Zuckerberg privately that he believed misinformation and fake news had influenced the election. According to the Post’s reporting, Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem, but said the posts weren’t widespread and there was no easy answer for how to deal with them. This certainly didn’t appear on his Facebook profile. And it raises the obvious question: Can Mark Zuckerberg be trusted?
This is no less than an existential question for the company. It highlights the challenge with trusting people over institutions: People are fickle. They change. They disappoint. In earlier eras, when the leader of a trusted institution failed to live up to the mores of the organization, he (and it was usually a “he”) could leave without threatening the existence of the institution. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon resigned, but the presidency retained its role in our society. To take an example from business, Boeing lost two CEOs in a row over ethics violations in the early aughts, but the company itself survived. And for more traditional businesses, this strategy can still work: On September 26, Equifax’s CEO stepped down.
By contrast, if we lose our faith in Zuckerberg, we lose our faith in Facebook.
By masking an institution as an individual, Zuckerberg has helped that institution to grow to an unprecedented size and influence without the skepticism that might have led regulators to take it on much earlier. But by so closely aligning his identity with the company’s, he has opened Facebook to a new kind of vulnerability. Now it will be up to him to figure out how to repair his own credibility and, at the same time, stop Facebook from undermining democracy. He must continue to convey that he is both the savvy businessman who, in just more than a decade, has grown to become the fifth richest man in the world—and also, by the way, is just a guy. The kind of guy who likes wildlife service dogs and can spend an afternoon on the range in South Dakota. The kind of guy anyone can trust.
Correction at 9:30 a.m. on 9/27/2017: This story previously stated that Mark Zuckerberg had nearly a million followers on Facebook, noting that was nearly the size of the circulation of The New Yorker. Zuckerberg has close to 100 million followers, or nearly 100 times the circulation of The New Yorker.
