Antonio Garcia Martinez, former Facebook Employee Interview
nymag.com
nymag.com
"He’s a micromanager, and I never even saw him once in the ads area micromanaging anything. He just doesn’t care."
"Zuck has famously never been very interested in either money or revenue of the company. Obviously he understands that it’s a necessary evil, but it’s the sort of thing that he just outsources to Sheryl and whatever lieutenants that are taking care of the ad system."
What likely really happened is Zuck et al were drinking the Koolaid about a more data-driven world and competing accordingly, without anticipating any public backlash. It's easy to believe that Big Data is a world-redefining panacea without consequences when you view yourself as a morally responsible steward of said data.
I've been deep in the data trenches, as it were, and very rarely is there much of an incentive or impetus to look up from the ground and ponder the potential ethical ramifications of what you're doing. Martinez did well to point out the difficulty of extrapolating second-order effects when it came to data-driven ad targeting.
A similar thing happened to Obama with the NSA - he obviously couldn't imagine a scenario where a tool like that might be handed over to the whims of a less restrained administration.
Also, the idea that Zuck would write anything about the political ads without consulting BD (Sheryl and others) is laughable. Not sure why Martinez would think that's even remotely possible. Zuck was almost certainly read into the situation immediately and has been firefighting ever since.