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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

It was standard crisis management PR sermon.

"learn from this experience", "doesn't change what happened in the past. ", "responsibility", "going forward", "together".

You find this same boilerplate from athletes who beat their wife, do drugs, or kill people.

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Exactly this; no one is sorry, they're sorry they got caught after the fact. This is simply an attempt at ass covering and shifting blame onto Cambridge Analytica so users / investors / governments don't sue Facebook.

Should Facebook be sued?

I want to say yes, but there is a problem with suing these sorts of monopolistic companies. If Facebook were to be sued, for lets say $100 million in a class action lawsuit, even if they end up paying, it ultimately won't change their behavior. They have enough money to pay that, take a small hit in their earnings for the short term, and then continue as if nothing happened.

You're absolutely right. This is a bullshit non-apology in which nobody is actually sorry for anything. It's crap and does nothing but try to shift blame.

Yet, maybe it serves a purpose? It doesn't matter how sorry they actually feel, nobody is going to feel better from a large, public, self-flagellating apology. Nobody is going to be happier or more mollified or satisfied. All it's going to accomplish is to provide grist for the lawsuit mill - after all, why apologize if you're not guilty?

Again, you're completely right. They're clearly not sorry.

I had a very hard time imagining Zuckerberg actually writing these words, it just felt too carefully crafted and full of standard PR tropes. The CNN interview should be interesting, then we can hear the actual words from his mouth.

The words he's been rehearsing in hours of mock interviews with the same PR hacks, for the last couple days.

I imagine he'll be answering questions provided to CNN by the Facebook PR team.

No need to create the paper trail, the "hard hitting"-looking questions any tv news outlet is going to ask are incredibly predictable.

I always see people say this after any PR crises... but how would you say it instead if not that? Is there a way to be truly creative and not shoot yourself in the foot at the same time?

He laid out what happened, and several concrete actions they're taking to prevent it from recurring. That's not boilerplate.

I think people are sort of doubtful they will really follow through whole-heartedly with what Zuck wrote, because that's sort of their MO.

Thoughts and prayers that our random business partners will behave.

...and go on to continue to beat their wife, do drugs...

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