Aren’t You Embarrassed?
Just a question for the CEOS
In late 2025, many tech executives are giving us a masterclass in communications failure.
Under pressure to answer for the ways their platforms breed fears about child safety, privacy, and exploitation, how they handle the complex nature of AI, many leaders in this space have been at best indignant and evasive, and at worst, startlingly clear about their own complicity.
A recent interview with a well-known tech CEO created some conversation when, frankly, it did not go well. The executive was generally dismissive and oppositional, unable to be moved from the company line that their platform is, and always has been, an “innovator” in online safety. Their argument, when distilled, comes down to scale: that being a massive platform means safety will inevitably lose out to functionality, speed, and “vision.”
Public reaction was understandably harsh. Headlines were unfavourable, comment sections were worse. Listeners and readers did not see a leader engaging in difficult, complex accountability, but someone who sees defensiveness and pedantic explanations as strategy.
One columnist summed it up cleanly: the real problem isn’t that one CEO talks this way. It’s that so many of them do.
To meaningfully survive in the world and enjoy your life, I believe you have to learn to hold contradictions. I believe you have to get comfortable with polarity, and you have to flex your muscle for grey thinking. Meaning, there are few times where it serves us all well to operate within a black and white binary of moralistic thinking. If our world and systems are inherently flawed, we will not survive them by always being righteous and good. We will survive them by playing some version of the game with the intention of doing the least damage possible.
I don’t negate the reality that predators will always find clever ways to congregate where children are. I don’t believe risk automatically outweighs opportunity. I think consumers have a responsibility to understand the chances they take when engaging online and to cultivate media literacy and critical thinking skills. And I understand that online platforms cannot out-parent parents, nor can any business exist without weighing decisions through profit, viability, and sustainability.
But I also don’t believe that executives of major digital platforms are capable of speaking about these issues with anything resembling nuance or humility.
The communications failures here have little to do with the pompous indifference that bleeds into childish indigence. It has everything to do with predictability.
What we’re witnessing is the most boring and uninteresting story in the world: powerful men choosing profit over people and congratulating themselves for it. Safety costs too much, harm is inevitable, victims are regrettable, but not strategic.
Performing sincerity doesn’t work for these CEOs because sincerity punctures the illusion they’re trying to sell: that their platforms are inherently benevolent, inherently future-building, inherently good. To admit to anything else would cost them something, whether it was financially, legally, or psychologically. Genuine ownership requires admitting that harm isn’t incidental but structural, and that their ongoing decisions created the conditions for it. So instead, they posture. They rely on scale as a shield, jargon as insulation, and the idea that if the system is big enough, their responsibility evaporates and diffuses across numbers we can’t conceive of.
This isn’t deviation, it’s obedience to a well-worn script. Tech leaders pretend to care when it aligns with strategy, and even then, it’s a brittle performance that collapses under scrutiny. What looks like apathy or empathy is usually just calculation.
Over a year ago, I found myself sick to my stomach in a school zone after spending the morning reading lawsuits, dark-web exchanges about bypassing safety filters, and messages between predators and children. Those children, the same age as the ones walking by my car, were being harmed not by “accidents of scale,” but by predictable vulnerabilities built into platforms that value growth over governance.
Some of those children would later die by suicide.
That, of course, is the part these executives will never comment on. Instead, they tell stories about how their platforms “save lives,” about how grateful parents call them with anecdotes of digital community and connection. They’ll highlight the successes and dismiss the failures as statistical noise.
That is a labour they can only pretend to do. The sleepless nights, the visionary burden, the “unprecedented challenges” aren’t the hard part. The hard part is accountability. The hard part is owning the harms, naming the failures, and fixing what broke. And that is a job they’ll never volunteer for.
As a researcher and investigator, I ardently reject the assertion that large social platforms are pioneers in safety. As a woman, I’m disgusted but unsurprised by the fragility of men in these spaces who claim back-breaking effort yet possess no visible spine. As a communications specialist, I’m unmoved by these predictable displays, though still baffled by how many speeches, posts, and interviews manage to avoid humanity entirely.
If I could get one of these CEOs in a room, I wouldn’t ask about technical solutions or their so-called future-proofing. I’d ask something far simpler:
“Aren’t you embarrassed?”