David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I just can’t believe it, though, after all these years and all this writing and all these headlines. If Cambridge Analytica were more competent, they probably could have had more impact. But as it stands, I just can’t believe there’s not a big story on the front page of major newspapers with big headlines saying, actually Cambridge Analytica didn’t really have that much in the first place, their methodology appears to have not worked, and mea culpa, sorry for getting you all all riled up. If you don’t want to like Facebook, sure. But go pick a different reason. Okay, so what happened with all this? It is worth knowing to finish the story earlier from the consent decree in 2011 that said Facebook is going to be carefully monitored for privacy concerns. As you can imagine, the Cambridge Analytica news coming out put a gigantic bullseye on Facebook. The FTC said, aha, you guys signed a consent decree a mere seven years ago. What the hell? This is exactly what we’re talking about. Facebook just decides, you know what? What’s the big dollar sign, that cheque that we can write here? Because there it seems like we just want this to be done, we want this to be buried. We are a different company now. We want to put that to bed. The whole settlement here was not specifically about Cambridge Analytica. There were a bunch of other things that are privacy-related, but the number is $5 billion. David, there is one thing that it comes with, and that is a 20-year window that they are monitoring Facebook. That is exactly matching to the words that Mark gave us on stage that Cambridge Analytica, the way they handled it was a 20-year mistake. Now, I think by the 20-year mistake, he meant much more of the damage to Facebook’s brand that came out of this than specifically the FTC settlement. It’s funny. I was thinking this is a very Facebook-appropriate comment. If we had subtitles for this episode, this one would be, it’s complicated.…

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