Mark Zuckerberg’s control over Facebook is unlikely

Now Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that their top policy executive, Nick Clegg, is being promoted and taking on the difficult task of navigating the upcoming legal and regulatory minefield. So now we have this new story: Zuckerberg could relinquish control and allow Meta Platforms Inc. to be operated by a sophisticated public-policy savvy.

But this announcement means that the social media company is actually doing two things. Yes, it’s delegating much of Zuckerberg’s responsibility around policy, relieving him of uncomfortable duties like answering lawmakers and allowing him to focus on building and monetizing the immersive world he wants. That we all live in one day (metaverse). Zuckerberg is tired of apologizing for the harmful side-effects of Facebook and has spent a lot of time at his Hawaii campus over the past year. He publicly ignored the whistle-blower revelations until the end of the week, leaving Clegg to take all the slings and arrows that came Facebook’s way.

It also creates an illusion that someone else may take a different line on company policy. Why give more power to another senior executive? “We need a senior leader at our level,” Zuckerberg wrote of Clegg’s promotion in a Facebook post last week.

Clegg was already Facebook’s most senior policy officer. Now he will go from reporting to Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg to reporting to both Sandberg and Zuckerberg. But Clegg was already in the room with the two; So it’s not so much a step up in the power structure as a slight change closer to the person who’s actually in the driver’s seat.

While the founders of other successful technology companies such as Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc. and Uber Technologies have split, the man who founded Facebook nearly 18 years ago still controls 58% of the voting shares and became the company’s chairman. lives. Thanks to a loyal board of directors, shareholder efforts to prevent that tight hold have failed. Zuckerberg’s top lieutenants, including Clegg, display the same kind of loyalty. Although Clegg was instrumental in setting up Facebook’s oversight board, the effectiveness of which has yet to be proven, he has to use his new position to steer the company in a healthier direction with regulators by hashing it out with Zuckerberg. Hard to see doing. This is certainly not how many political historians remember Clegg’s relationship with former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, for whom he acted more like a ‘sidekick’ than a coalition ally.

What’s really troubling for Meta is that for the Metaverse to succeed, Zuckerberg will need to roll up his sleeve and dive deep into the public policy work he hates. Already one of the most pressing new issues it’s facing revolves around policy and human behavior: There have been several alleged incidents of harassment of women on Meta’s social Metaverse platform Horizon Venue, in which Incidents of virtual groping and alleged virtual gang rape.

Microsoft has already delivered a masterclass on how to respond: Last Wednesday, it announced a slew of measures to address harassment on its own Metaverse platform, including a popular area for its three main social virtual- Turned off reality (VR) apps completely. Meet up and play games with strangers called campfires. Microsoft is reportedly turning on security bubbles by default for all of its virtual reality visitors, promoting online moderation and automatically muting anyone who participates in an event.

Facebook’s efforts to address Metaverse security appear weak by comparison. Following reports of harassment, it introduced the option to block avatars from within two feet of a user’s own avatar. Blocking tools certainly hold promise, but they have been put under test in gaming and can be misused as a blockade against others. A more serious attempt to establish security as a standard would be to shut down Meta’s social VR platforms — as did Microsoft — and then redesign them with security in mind.

But it seems unlikely that Nick Clegg will push for such major reforms. As long as Zuckerberg maintains his current level of control over the social media firm he’s headed for nearly two decades, we can expect the status quo to prevail.

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.