Running head: CHOOSING TO LIE 1
Notably, people are often blinded with their own self-interest and propensity to lie and Mark Zuckerberg has no exception. A number of ethical issues and violations have been raised against Mark Zuckerberg that has raised eye brows to all Facebook users and also the United States government (Granville, 2018). Mark Zuckerberg has made incredible lies to Facebook users promising them security and privacy of their data yet instead uses their data for his personal gains (Granville, 2018). The concept of creative behavior is made up of 4 steps which entail problem formation, information collection, generation of ideas, and evaluation of ideas (Organizational behavior). Mark Zuckerberg is an extremely innovative and creative individual. Therefore, this paper is in relation to creative behavior involving ethical dilemma deciding to lie which gives ways in which organizations can lie and how it relate or apply to Mark Zuckerberg or his way of leadership.
Mark Zuckerberg is very good at thinking creatively to solve problems. Upon the privacy and security issues that emerge regarding sharing of facebook users’ data with Cambridge Analytica being noticed, Mark Zuckerberg became creative to save himself and the company from this controversial issue by choosing to lie that he was not aware about Cambridge Analytica and any other third party apps using data and information from Facebook that facilitated manipulation of the United States 2016 elections (Granville, 2018). This starts the creative process starting with problem formulation (Organizational behavior). The problem has been identified as the privacy and security issues attributed to Facebook users’ data.
Mark Zuckerberg as the CEO and founder of Facebook has both corporate and ethical responsibility to safeguard and ensure protection and privacy of Facebook user’s data (Granville, 2018). He took immediate step to gather information from various sources to determine whether it is true that Cambridge Analytica had obtained data from Facebook and as well investigate on how Cambridge Analytica managed to gain access and obtain data from Facebook. Moreover, Mark Zuckerberg did an extensive investigation at his farm to gather information that would help him determine if there were other companies that had invaded and acquired information from Facebook illegally without their knowledge.
Mark Zuckerberg then proceeded to generate ideas that would help him solve the issue and avoid further scandals (Granville, 2018). To avoid Facebook falling into controversial and critical scandals like this, Mark Zuckerberg came up with the following ideas; to restrict third party apps access from accessing and obtaining data from Facebook by revoking licenses of all third party apps, warned Facebook users about online security threats and also renewed the terms of use and condition that every Facebook user had to review and accept to it in order to continue using Facebook, closed pseudo Facebook accounts and restricted possession of multiple account by a single user (Granville, 2018).
Mark Zuckerberg then evaluated all his options he had come up with. He analyzed all option taking into consideration both the negative and positive impacts that could result out of them (Newkirk & Viehauser, 2008). He analyzed both his ethical and corporate responsibility then ultimately decided that claiming that Facebook was never aware of Cambridge Analytica’s activities would reduce Facebooks corporate losses as well as to maintain his ethical image (Granville, 2018). He decided to lie so as to avoid defamation and as well maintain trust from Facebook users and the United States government too.
In essence, the issue that claims Mark Zuckerberg collaborated with Cambridge Analytica to obtain information from Facebook to use them to manipulate the United States elections has been a big concern to Facebook that has been controversial issue for a long term. Mark Zuckerberg had to stand up for his company to defend himself and the company. So by him choosing to lie is for the good of his own company, Facebook.