September 29, 1982, seemed like a day that would live in corporate-America infamy after three Chicagoans died from taking cyanide-laced capsules of extra-strength Tylenol. In the coming days, four others would die from ingesting a corrupted version of the painkiller, which had been laced with cyanide. Johnson & Johnson, the maker of Tylenol, would subsequently be thrust into one of the biggest nightmares in its history. An investigation by the Food and Drug Administration suggest that someone had purchased the extra-strength Tylenol bottles over the counter, injected cyanide into the capsules, re-sealed the bottles, and then put them back on store shelves. Tylenol instantly initiated a total recall of the pills, the first of its kind in the United States. Many Wall Street analysts and media observers thought the company would never recover. Yet, just two months later, Tylenol was back on shelves (with a new tamperproof bottle). Today, most people don’t even remember what happened.

This tragic crisis, and the company’s response, has since become a lesson in how major corporations can manage unforeseen disasters. James Burke, Johnson & Johnson’s chairman at the time, didn’t hesitate to recall the pills and wait to put them back on store shelves until he knew what had gone wrong—a decision that would cost his company some $100 million. As a retrospective New York Times story detailed, Burke looked like he was in complete control of a situation that no one could manage. In doing so, he created the modern playbook for the major-product recalls of Ford Explorers, Firestone tires, and children’s toys like “Jarts,” among countless others.

This sort of upfront, responsible, adult form of crisis management offers a useful foil to the manner in which Facebook has explained how Russian operatives used its platform to meddle in the 2016 election. In a recent interview with Axios’s Mike Allen, Facebook C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged that she wished the meddling “hadn’t happened” on the company’s platform, but she stopped short of owning up to the mess. Instead, she rehashed bizarre arguments about how Facebook is not a media company. “At our heart we’re a tech company—we don’t hire journalists,” she told Allen.

It’s worth recalling, of course, that it wasn’t the makers of Tylenol who put cyanide in the pills that killed seven innocent people; nevertheless, the company felt a responsibility to come up with a solution to the problem. While Facebook’s engineers may not be posting fake news, the dirt is still on their hands. “The damage done to organizations in crises isn’t the crisis itself— it’s how you handle the crisis,” Scott Galloway, author of the new book The Four: The Hidden D.N.A. of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, told me this week on the latest episode of the Inside the Hive podcast. “There’s only one thing you have to remember: you have to overcorrect. You have to clear every shelf of all Tylenol nationwide. You can’t say this is an isolated incident and it won’t happen again.”

Galloway specifically pointed to Sandberg’s comments in Washington, both to Allen and on Capitol Hill the day before, as examples of insincerity. “It’s not only bullshit, but from a pure shareholder standpoint at Facebook, it’s stupid,” Galloway said. “Martha Stewart didn’t go to jail for insider trading; she went to jail for denying she had traded on insider information; she went to jail for obstruction of justice.” He went on to point out that in his mind, Sandberg was intentionally blurring lines around what happened, and that she may not actually believe what she is saying publicly. “I feel that Sheryl Sandberg was eerily reminiscent of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was forced to go out and say something that I believe she knows is not true. I believe that anyone who is as intelligent as Sheryl Sandberg is—I think she is a remarkable woman—I think she knows they are a media company, and for her, I think she’s towing the party line on behalf of her boss, and eroding her own credibility. I think she had her Sarah Huckabee Sanders moment, and it’s really a shame.”

In Galloway’s eyes, people are going to grow more frustrated with Facebook—this is a theme I’ve personally heard from a lot of people, both in government and in Silicon Valley—and that unless the company takes full responsibility for what happened, and dedicates an extraordinary amount of money and resources to stopping it from happening again, as Johnson & Johnson did with Tylenol in 1982, the repercussions could be devastating. “I think if they continue to deny this, and it happens again, which it will—if they don’t put in a lot of safeguards, I think we’re going to get angrier and angrier, and provide support for cloud cover for increased regulation or fines,” he said. “This is serious. Either it’s this government, or the European government, but this is going to get real.”

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