Facebook's Brown: We Were Caught 'Flat-Footed'

Campbell Brown

Facebook was blindsided by the user-data scandal that has grabbed the headlines in the past week — and the company has undergone an “awakening” to deal with the crisis, said Campbell Brown, the company’s head of news partnerships.

“We are in a position now where we have to be judged by our actions,” said Brown, speaking Thursday on a panel at the Financial Times’ Future of News conference in New York City.

According to Variety, Brown, a former CNN host and NBC News reporter, joined Facebook in January 2017. “Inside the company — and outside the company — people are very upset. I’m  upset. This breach of trust that’s happened, as Mark [Zuckerberg] described it, doesn’t feel good for anyone.”

“We’ve been caught flat-footed,” Brown continued, saying Facebook was “focused too much on the positive” and not the negative aspects of the platform. “There is an awakening that is taking place inside the company where the mentality is ‘all hands on deck’ to address this.”

Last week, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg addressed the swirling controversy about the misappropriation of data on 50 million users by Trump-affiliated political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, after several days of staying mum.

Asked why it took Zuckerberg as long as he did to come forward to speak on the issue, Brown said there is a “tension” between getting out immediately with statements that “may be half-baked” versus “doing the legwork internally to find out what happened… and come out with answers and how you’re going to address the problem.”