Best of the Week: Facebook’s data disaster; Sunlies and Uber recordings; JCVD and me; Trimantium’s adventures

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome to Best of the Week. There’s nothing like doing a few days of digital detox as a reminder of how quickly media moves. As my phone went out of range on the isthmus of Maria Island, Pete and Karl Stefanovic were still Nine’s golden boys, Sunrise’s Brekky Central was the home of unthreatening cheerfulness and Trimantium Growth Ops floating on the ASX still looked like a madcap caper. On Monday night, I turned my phone back on in Hobart and fired up Facebook. Luckily, Facebook knows me incredibly well, so my news feed had me up to date on exactly the topics I’d be interested in in no time at all. This of course included the news that Facebook was about to have the worst week in its history, thanks to how incredibly well it knows its audience. Facebook’s worst week Which makes Facebook - and the actions of Cambridge Analytica - a good place to start. Last weekend saw revelations from The Guardian and Channel 4 in the UK about Cambridge Analytica. If the name seems familiar, it may be because ADMA brought the company’s head of product out to Australia this time last year, promoting him as “the man behind the data” for Donald Trump’s election campaign. There was something of a backlash towards ADMA at the time from those who opposed Trump’s agenda. The scandal revealed by The Guardian and its sister weekend paper The Observer last week, was based on claims made by a whistleblower who said the company has used data harvested from Facebook users to target US voters. At the time of the harvesting, Facebook allowed third parties to grab such data when users logged into quiz apps and similar via their Facebook ID. The data also covered users’ friends whose own privacy settings were insufficiently tight. With Facebook’s reputation still in the doldrums over revelations that it ran large quantities of Russian-backed ads designed to prevent Hillary Clinton from winning the US election, the scandal had everything - including links to Trump’s then campaign mastermind Steve Bannon. It went off like a rocket. And Facebook comprehensively failed its crisis comms. But I’ll come to that in a moment. First, it’s worth making the point that many of us in the communications industry - not just Cambridge Analytica - are in the business of behaviour change. That can be behaviour change for good - like persuading people to pay their taxes or wear seatbelts; it can be neutral, such as persuading people to switch from brand to another; or it might be the potentially more amoral world of politics. Indeed, Mumbrella’s MSIX conference, which is curated each year by Thinkerbell’s Adam Ferrier - focuses on behaviour change. It’s one of my favourite events we do, because the science of behavioural economics - nudge theory, if you like - is so fascinating. And If the claims about Cambridge Analytica are true, it might simply be that they’re better at influencing behaviour change than the rest of us. (And that’s a big “if”, by the way.) This has been a mainstream news story in a way that previous scares about Facebook privacy breaches have not. I suspect that most Facebook users will have reached the end of week with a sense from news coverage that their privacy had been compromised, even if they couldn’t quite articulate how. And that’s where media - or a fair chunk of it - also risks hypocrisy. Campaigning journalism, including influencing political outcomes, is a mainstay of media. The openness from a newspaper about using its considerable influence to change the outcome of an election arguably reached its height in the UK in 1992. The Conservatives pulled off a narrow, shock victory over Labour’s Neil Kinnock, thanks at least in part to a vigorous campaign by News Corp’s The Sun newspaper. The day of the election, the paper led with the headline “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights". And when John Major duly made it back into office, The Sun bragged on its front page: “It’s The Sun wot won it”. It was a statement later disavowed by Rupert Murdoch, although in the decades since, his newspapers in Australia haven’t been afraid to advocate to their readers which way to vote. So there’s nothing new about media being used as a tool to influence the democratic process. However much of this week’s scandal, does remind me of one of my favourite scenes in the terrific movie about the GFC, The Big Short. In the movie, hedge fund financiers have a hunch that home loans are about to go into default and head to Florida, where they quiz a pair of slimy mortgage brokers about their practices. The brokers proudly lay out the dubious applicants they’ve been signing up for unaffordable loans in pursuit of lucrative bonuses. “I was a bartender - now I own a boat”, one boasts. The financial types can’t work out why the sleazy duo are so upfront about what they’ve been up to. “I don’t get it. Why are they confessing?” one asks. “They’re not confessing. They’re bragging,” comes the reply. I rather suspect that’s the case with some of the bigger claims from Cambridge Analytica that emerged in the undercover footage aired by Channel 4. When they sniff new business, agencies are known to claim they can do all sorts of things that they actually can’t. They’re better than anyone else at how they use data, how they gain insights, how they drive behaviour change. If they win the business, they can always go and white label work from someone else later. And in the case of Cambridge Analytica’s suspended boss, the bragging extended to boasts over drinks of knowing how to use fake news and dirty tricks to swing elections. I suspect he was rather more talk than action. I doubt they were actually that effective when it came to using the Facebook data to target the public either. There has been no evidence that it was Cambridge Analytica wot won it. But for Facebook, which has already been suffering from a fake news problem, the claims certainly make the company an unwanted former bedfellow. And where Facebook blew it on the communications front was the lengthy silence from its founder Mark Zuckerberg. By Wednesday afternoon, I found myself refreshing Zuckerberg’s Facebook page every few minutes, unable to believe there had still been no public comment from the face of the brand. Searching the phrase “Where’s Mark Zuckerberg,” brought up dozens of news stories asking that question. Thursday saw our annual CommsCon conference bring together communications professionals at the Westin in Sydney. In a number of sessions, our speakers had updated their presos to talk about [Facebook’s Zuckberg-less communications vacuum](. As Robyn Sefiani put it on stage: “What he should have done was come out within 15 minutes of this revelation and said: ‘We’re alarmed by what’s happened, it’s going to take us time to come to grips with this, but we will, and we’ll keep you informed’*.” And it took until Thursday morning, Australian time, for the statement from Zuckerberg to finally arrive. By then, some of the facts had been lost from the narrative. His message that the extraction of the data had been within the company’s terms of service at the time, but the rules had since changed, was easy to miss in the noise. Many casual readers will have picked up a general impression of some sort of hack or data breach, even if that wasn’t what actually happened. Indeed, better communications were coming from Facebook’s engineering guru Andrew Bosworth. Boz, as he’s known, had his own timeline out faster. I saw him speak in the US a couple of years back. He’s a much better natural explainer of tricky technical nuance than his boss. At the time I watched him on stage at the IAB’s New York event, Facebook had just been through a furore over failings in its video analytics. Boz explained straightforwardly, and plausibly, how it had happened. Having heard him, I came away far less cynical about that particular issue. It was the same this time - if you knew where to look. [Boz’s much earlier post]( made the point - again lost in the noise - that this wasn’t some plot by Facebook, and releasing user data wouldn’t make business sense, even if it was previously possible to extract it. As Boz put it: “This is the opposite of our business model. Yes developers can receive data that helps them provide better experiences to people, but we don't make money from that directly and have set this up in a way so that no one's personal information is sold to businesses. We are able to show better ads when we know more about people relative to other businesses, so giving data to them is the opposite of a good strategy.” I buy that. Unfortunately for Facebook though, the week saw it fail to get out from under its own bout of fake news. The drumbeat got a lot louder for a need for Facebook to be regulated like a public utility. And many users thought harder than ever before about what information they actually want to share with the social network in the future. When we look back, those are the consequences that will make this Facebook’s watershed week. Sunlies Meanwhile, it’s been a bad few days for both of the country’s commercial breakfast TV shows. Seven’s Sunrise aired a segment featuring commentator Prue MacSween in a discussion on indigenous sexual abuse. Asking an angry uninformed white woman to discuss such a sensitive topic might seem like a misjudgment of tone if nothing else. But the show should have known what it was getting into, given MacSween’s previous efforts including last year’s call from her on 2GB for former ABC presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied to be run over. While I was off the grid in Tasmania, I missed a text message from a friend: “G’day cobber...” (She was being ironically Australian) “There’s a protest happening outside Ch7/ Sunrise this morning re that fuckwitted segment on indigenous kids. Strikes me you might be on holibobs but news never sleeps, eh?” Given my state of disconnectivity, in that case, news was gently napping, as far as I was concerned at least. As it was for whoever was producing Sunrise that morning. The problem for Sunrise is that while the Martin Place backdrop for the show gives life and energy on a good day, it’s hard to deliver light hearted breakfast banter while angry protestors wave banners in the background. So they took the decision to mislead viewers by playing stock footage of a quiet Martin Place in the background. For viewer trust - and this is after all a show that reports in to the news and current affairs department - this feels deliberately deceptive. It made it look like the show had something to hide. Better to have switched segments to parts of the studio set that don’t use the Martin Place backdrop. From a technical point of view, I know that switching where a segment takes place on the set is perfectly possible at short notice. I once went on Sunrise wearing a green T-shirt, unaware that segment was due to be in front of a greenscreen backdrop - which would have resulted in the same image being projected onto my shirt as the screen behind me. When he spotted it, the floor manager smoothly shifted the segment to another backdrop and had the crew reset the studio in seconds. They certainly weren’t obliged to show viewers the protests throughout the show, but actively misleading them isn’t a good way to build trust. And it saves their comms people from having to issue [dubious justifications about concerns for the young children watching](. Not that Nine’s Today had any better week, after it emerged that an Uber driver had gone to the press regarding a loud speaker conversation between presenters Peter and Karl Stefanovic in which they reportedly slagged off their colleagues. At first, this was reported as having been recorded by the Uber driver. By the time the article broke in New Idea, it became a claim that the driver merely had a great memory and there’d been no such illegal recording. Worth noting, by the way, that New Idea is published by Seven West Media’s Pacific Magazines. So it was certainly a chance to put one over a rival. I’m yet to talk to anybody in journalism who believes for a moment that the magazine would have published an article based only on the word of the Uber driver. In these dangerous libel-laden times an editor willing to take that risk ought to be fired. So of course there’s a recording. But I’m sure New Idea has made the decision that unless one of the Stefanovics complains to the police - which won’t happen as they’ll want to move on from the embarrassment - the magazine will get away with it. ASB on JCVD Meanwhile, nestling in my inbox when I came back online this week was a note from the Ad Standards Board regarding automotive brand Ultra Tune. Back in January I wrote the following: “You may recall that when I mentioned the forthcoming Tyson ad in Best of the Week back in November, I also flagged my surprise that the brand’s previous celebrity outing was okayed by the Ad Standards Board. “It featured a group of women on a dark Melbourne street being menaced by a gang. (Which hasn’t really aged well as a concept in the light of the current media furore over “African gangs” in Victoria, has it?) Then they’re rescued by Jean-Claude Van Damme. “My suspicion at the time was that while the ASB cleared the less violent 30 second version of the ad, they hadn’t looked at the 45-second version in which one of the gang members uses a baseball bat to smash the headlight on the women’s car. “As I said back in November, I felt a bit uncomfortable about creating a story by reporting it to the ASB, but had been surprised nobody else had done so. “So having given it some more thought, I have now formally reported it. I’ll keep you informed on what happens to the complaint.” [The ASB upheld my complaint](. The ad has now been banned. I’m glad and, having had an opportunity to see the process up close, impressed with how the self-regulation system functions. But I’m still a bit uncomfortable about creating my own story. When it comes to submitting ASB complaints, I don’t think I’ll be making a habit of it. TGO on ASX And while we’re covering the housekeeping, I’m gobsmacked to see [Trimantium Growth Ops made it onto the ASX]( while I was away, even if the initial shareholders register indicates a very small ownership group. It ended the week with a market capitalisation of nearly $120m. I’m eating my metaphorical hat, and will look forward to its full year results with some interest. As ever, I welcome your thoughts via tim@mumbrella.com.au. And our editor Vivienne Kelly is on the newsdesk this weekend. You can reach her at vivienne@mumbrella.com.au. For now though, have a great weekend. Toodlepip... Tim Burrowes Content director - Mumbrella Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia [Unsubscribe](| [Manage Subscriptions]( [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](