Facebook's Worst Nightmare (aka Mr. Zuckerberg goes to Washington)

When Facebook "opened up" to anyone with an email address, the only restriction between the "high school" site and the rest of Facebook was that adults had to have friends in common with underage users to be able to "friend" them. This is how the alleged "Philadelphia Facebook Killer" found his victims and planned his crimes. Just out of college, he had been a longtime user of the site but had not had any high school aged friends on Facebook until each of the three girls looked up their rowing coach, and found his profile, which in addition to displaying his desire for "whatever I can get," also showed pictures of him drinking with other young people and in various states of undress. These photos were even "tagged" for easy viewing by his "friends."

When Chairman Waxman asked him why Facebook had not, as MySpace did, made agreements with 49 State Attorneys General regarding child protection, or even approached any law enforcement representatives about the issue, Zuckerberg nervously replied:  

"We didn't think that we had to, considering the steps we took to separate the high school site from everyone else. I mean, how many college graduates have friends who are in high school? There is even a separate URL for them to go to, http://hs.facebook.com. We didn't think it would be an issue, and our users liked the ability to keep in touch with their younger siblings when they went off to college. I never thought anything like this would ever come up, because we thought we were doing things better than the competition."

Waxman's staff showed Zuckerberg a group of TV news reports and newspaper clippings about some of the events that had spurred DeWolfe and MySpace to make so many agreements and devote so much time and money to protection efforts, and the Chairman angrily asked Zuckerberg "If you were smart enough to get into Harvard, how come you couldn't see what was happening to your biggest competitor possibly happening to you, and how come it never occurred to you that you might want to be more proactive in protecting people?" Zuckerberg turned around to whisper with one of his lawyers, and then faced Waxman, answering that at the time, Facebook was restricted to people with a college or corporate email address and they could reasonably connect an identity to an account, so they were not concerned about "those types of things going on with our site." Barely containing his anger, the Chairman thundered back:  

"When you opened your service to young children, and then anyone with an email address, why didn't you realize you were entering the same territory that Mr. DeWolfe's company had crossed, the same minefield, and that maybe you might want to do some of the things they did? What made you so different? If you're so smart, how did you miss that? You two do the same thing, and one of you corrected your mistakes. The other one of you watched, probably laughed, and then made the exact same mistake and to date has not even attempted to offer an explanation or cooperate with interested authorities."

Ranking Member Chris Shays (R-CT), sitting beneath a large ornate portrait of himself, was particularly concerned about the lack of differences between the "high school" version of the site and the rest of it,  asking the so-called Boy CEO:

"What made you think that when designing a site targeted towards high school students, that it would be appropriate to give a 14 year old girl the option of telling the world, especially when she can connect with your college and adult users, the fact that she's interested in 'random play and whatever I can get?' How can you say you created a seperarate community for younger users to safely socialize when the things they can do are exactly the same as the adults, no matter how age-inappropriate? You say that parents can use the site to network with their friends and colleagues, but you don't even provide a way for those same parents to see what their children are doing online and who their friends are! You talk about the need for parents to take responsibility for their children, but do you provide a way to help them? Absolutely not!"

Zuckerberg nervously replied that those decisions were made by programmers and that he was not personally involved. When Davis asked him how many people Facebook employed to check registered users against sex offender lists, monitor levels of traffic between "adult" networks and the high school site, or respond to possible issues of  so-called cyberstalking or cyberbullying against children, Zuckerberg said that he believed that those issues were handled on a case-by-case basis by their technical support and customer service staffs, and that "if someone was getting unwanted messages, they could simply ignore them." Davis then pointed to instances where Facebook had removed access to users who they believed were sending too many messages or had too many "friends" and thundered back "if you can monitor how many messages someone sends or how many friends they have, couldn't you detect any instances when there is a usage pattern that might be abnormal for say, someone who is listed a college alumnus when it involves communication with abnormal amounts of high school students?"

Zuckerberg quietly gave a vague answer about the amount of staff he would have had to hire to implement such a program, and noted that Facebook is still a privately held company with a small staff.

This heated exchange was only the beginning of what is shaping up to be a tough time for the embattled Facebook mogul, who is being sued by the families of the three murdered Philadelphia girls, as well as being investigated by the FTC for illegally disclosing information about underage users to advertisers and marketing companies, including millions of mobile phone numbers. In addition, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is considering filing Criminal Negligence charges against the company in connection with a string of identity theft rings believed to be perpetrated using data harvested from Facebook using their "Facebook Platform."

This all takes place as various Congressmen have announced plans to introduce legislation placing these "social networking" sites under the jurisdiction of either the FTC or the Federal Communications Commission, as well as Attorney General John Edwards' announcement that the Department of Justice would be opening investigation into allegations that Facebook "flagged" certain profiles of users in American networks based on users' names, listed "religious views" and connections to others with the same views, as well as "group membership" and forwarded all of their correspondence and activity logs to the Department of Homeland Security during the later years of the Bush administration without so much as a court order or a warrant from a judge.

Even more troubling to some industry observers is a subpoena from the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, where Chairman Joseph Biden (D-DE) has indicated interest in Facebook's Chinese network, which human rights advocates believe has been used by the Communist government to track and round up pro-democracy dissidents, in a controversy which evokes memories of a series of hearings several years ago where industry leaders from Cisco, Yahoo! and Google were lambasted by the legendary late Rep.Tom Lantos (D-CA), a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, and whose seat is occupied by former Stanford law professor and Internet law expert Rep. Lawrence Lessig (D-CA), who also sits on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, but asked no questions, only making a brief statement on what he considered to be troubling trends in Internet privacy practices, which he believes have been severely eroded even after the end of the Bush administration and despite the repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act, at the urging of President Obama and with the overwhelming support of Senate Majority Leader Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

With Monday's hearing being the first of five scheduled for the Facebook CEO, Observers were not impressed by Zuckerberg's early performance, and were pessimestic about his chances of getting out of his trip to Washington unscathed. Attorney David Boise, perhaps best known for his role in the Clinton-era antitrust case against Microsoft, panned Zuckerberg's demeanor and unprepared attitude, nothing "I feel like I've gone back a decade and am watching Bill Gates being questioned all over again."

(FYI, this article is obviously, fictional. It is a first in a series of depictions of "worst-case scenarios" that can and will befall new media companies that ignore Washington at their peril. Make sure to read the whole thing. Got a problem? That's why I have comments).