Public Penitence: Facebook and the Performance of Apology

Abstract

This article explores the 2018 apology campaign launched by Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. While the campaign has largely been read as a failure, this article reads the five key moments of apology against the broader cultural discourse produced by the social media giant in order to argue that the campaign is actually quite successful. Facebook uses the performance of apology to create a divided perception of the company that allows it to reroute the expected transformation of the penitent into a strengthening of its brand identity, pointing to the immense discursive power of Facebook.