Friday, May 17
Hi, Alex Kantrowitz here. Typically, I stay away from writing about how companies engage with the press. It's the definition of inside baseball — of great interest to reporters (and others with incurable Twitter addictions) yet not nearly as consequential as the machine. But this week, I'm making an exception.
Last Friday, in the late afternoon on the West Coast, Facebook published a blog post noting it had filed a lawsuit against Rankwave, a South Korean analytics company that built Facebook apps and "failed to cooperate with our efforts to verify their compliance with our policies."
If you've been following Facebook's misadventures, you might recall another app that failed to comply with Facebook's policies — "thisisyourdigitallife." The app collected a trove of user data and illicitly delivered it to Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that used it in its work for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. (Whether this data was useful is another question).
The Cambridge Analytica episode shook Facebook. It got Mark Zuckerberg called in front of Congress, damaged the company's reputation, and hurt employee morale. Facebook, amid the backlash, promised to better police its app developers, and something clearly smelled bad enough with Rankwave that it filed suit against the South Korean company.
The Rankwave story, given this context, is big news. Yet few beyond the tech press and those who follow it noticed. Why? Don't ignore the timing: Facebook dropped the Rankwave blog post late on a Friday, a move that all but assured the news would receive less attention than had Facebook dropped it in the middle of the week (a time when reporters could make calls to sources without interrupting their sources' weekends, and when people are generally willing to sit and read about this stuff).
Facebook isn't the first company to dump news, and it won't be the last. But frankly, it's telling that the company, on a mission to convince the world it's a good corporate citizen, would engage in the practice at all. And this was hardly Facebook's first news dump. An hour before the Mueller report dropped last month, Facebook added an italicized update to a blog post titled "Keeping Passwords Secure," noting it stored millions of Instagram passwords, well, insecurely. A day before the 2018 midterms, Facebook admitted it didn't do enough to prevent violence in Myanmar. And on Thanksgiving Eve in 2018, it confessed to hiring Definers, a smear shop that helped operate a 'news' site, NTK Network, that published articles slamming Facebook's competitors and critics.
After the Rankwave disclosure hit last week, Washington Post reporter Tony Romm asked: "How to square Facebook's news dump with its repeated pledges it cares about transparency." Posed in question format, it let Facebook off easy. There's nothing to square, the actions say it all.
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