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One of leadership theories is ethical leadership, ethical leaders focus mainly on what is right and demonstrate to their followers that they are there to help and not exploit others (Thornton, 2013). Northouse (2016) states that there are five principles of leadership: respect, service, justice, community, and honesty. Zuckerberg ensured that he respected his fellow colleagues and listened to their viewpoints. Furthermore, Zuckerberg placed his follower’s welfare at the top of the list by showing concern for employees’ mental health. The next principle is justice; ethical leaders are concerned about fairness in the workplace. Zuckerberg treated all employees equally, which shows to his employees that he believes in them making them more inclined to stay loyal (Zuckerberg, n.d.). Zuckerberg also worked hard to build a community where everyone worked together as a group, a former employee likened Facebook to a cult where all employees would follow their manager's orders in line with their colleagues in order to progress (Rodriguez, 2019). The last principle is honesty; this is an important factor for an ethical leader. Zuckerberg was largely dishonest throughout the Cambridge Analytica scandal harvesting data without users' consent, and spreading fake news followed by not taking the blame for his actions.
However, Zuckerberg as a leader is largely unethical. Unethical leadership is when the leader knows the right thing to do but does something less than that for harmful reasons. Zuckerberg states that he lives his life unethically but legally (Mezrich, 2019), this lacks moral decency and fails to provide concern for others. Facebook unethically harvested the personal information of millions of Facebook users in what Christopher Wylie describes as a “grossly unethical experiment” (Liptak, 2018). They then built models to exploit what Facebook knew about them and target their inner devil, manipulating Facebook users. Zuckerberg lacked consideration for the users that had had their data harvested failing to alert users of their wrongdoing and took minimal steps to recover the data of more than 50 million users (Graham-Harrison & Cadwalladr, 2018). Facebook threatened Carole Cadwalldr and Christopher Wiley that if they published they would sue this shows that Facebook was guilty of unethical data harvesting. Zuckerbergs' initial response was to remain silent for five days; the first 24 hours after the story broke Facebook PR was engaged in a self-defeating argument to establish whether a data breach had occurred. Facebook stated that no passwords or sensitive pieces of data were hacked (Wong, 2019). This shows that Zuckerberg was largely dishonest and unethical. Furthermore, Zuckerberg refused to speak to the UK parliament about data abuse along with nine other countries. Eventually, Zuckerberg admitted that he had ‘made a mistake’ and that Facebook would change how it shares data with third-party apps in an attempt to rebuild trust, however, it is questionable whether this is enough. Furthermore, former employees of Facebook were shocked when the scandal came out, suggesting that they did not know of the unethical data harvesting that Zuckerberg had conducted. Wylie was also asked by Facebook lawyers in August 2016 to destroy any data that he had held that had been collected by Cambridge Analytica (Graham-Harrison & Cadwalladr, 2018), this is dishonest in order to destroy evidence that there may be against them.
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