“I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform,” wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement that addressed a series of news stories reporting Facebook’s data had been misused. In the 937-word statement, posted on his Facebook profile Wednesday afternoon, Zuckerberg outlined all that Facebook has done and plans to do to keep our data safe.

But while he has addressed the news issue he hasn’t addressed the underlying problem. By the time Mark Zuckerberg made his amends it was already too late.

What has happened in the last five days has been the biggest crisis of Facebook’s existence. But Zuckerberg’s five-day silent treatment may prove more damning for Facebook than any of the news that precipitated it. This wouldn’t be nearly as extreme crisis for most companies. When bad things happen at other Fortune 500 companies, there is a script they follow—call it good crisis PR. The head of communications promises to look into an issue. A CEO makes a statement, well-reviewed by the legal team beforehand. If the crisis is really bad, someone resigns or gets fired. Once the perceived villain has been held accountable, everyone returns to normal unscathed. These corporate theatrics have come to embody the acceptable approach to business accountability.

But Facebook has always been a different kind of company—billing itself as a more intimate, personal service than, say, a car manufacturer (like Volkswagen) or an oil distributor (like BP). After all, what Facebook is selling is intimacy: a place to house your thoughts and opinions, and connect to friends and family. You can trust Facebook—you have to! You friends are here! And your number one friend, Mark Zuckerberg, is always at the ready to tell you what Facebook is doing and why.

But Facebook has always been a different kind of company—billing itself as an more intimate, personal service

Until the past year, this approach to building Facebook has been Zuckerberg’s chief asset. He intuited earlier than most that a decade after the internet’s introduction, people had begun to trust individuals over companies, and the best way to build a 21st century business was to build it in the guise of a person. As he told Bloomberg BusinessWeek last fall, “People trust people, not institutions.”

The service he built has only accelerated this shift. By its nature, Facebook elevates individuals while deprecating institutions. Individuals are the atoms, connecting to one another to spread information. Institutions get “pages,” which can be liked and shared—or ignored—by those people. Facebook’s role in society has been to transfer to individuals many of the activities, like recommending news articles, sourcing vacation destinations, and figuring out the best twin stroller for city dwellers, that used to reside with institutions.

But for Facebook to succeed in the midst of this shift in authority, Zuckerberg knew it needed a relatable individual to be a stand-in for the company—a recognizable, authentic voice who users felt they knew. That proxy would be Zuckerberg. So, as the service has grown from a place for college kids’ to poke each other to a global communications utility, he has repositioned himself into a pseudo-statesman. He has spoken at the United Nations General Assembly. He has started a hybrid philanthropy and investment outfit to put his billiions of dollars to work in service of solving intractable social problems. Last year he traveled to all fifty states, photographer in tow. All of this has been documented on his Facebook profile, along with photos in which he’s baking with his wife for the Jewish holidays or celebrating the Chinese New Year with his children. Inside Facebook, there are communications professionals dedicated to reviewing and ghostwriting his posts, and helping him craft and maintain this profile, which has more than 105 million followers. (For context, that’s just less than the total subscriber base of Netflix.)

Zuckerberg intuited that a decade after the internet’s introduction, people had begun to trust individuals over companies

Early on, this strategy worked. Facebook’s users were, like Zuckerberg, American Ivy Leaguers interested in using his network for similar things—dating, posting drunk selfies, dating. Facebook’s problems were comparably narrow, and when the company clashed with users—usually by overstepping in the way it introduced new services, causing users to fear they were ceding too much control of personal information—Zuckerberg could speak to them directly. The first such letter I remember arrived in September 2006, just after Facebook launched the News Feed. “We really messed this one up,” it began. He explained himself, asked for patience, and suggested a fix. This approach became Zuckerberg’s playbook for addressing problems. It mostly worked. Facebookers forgave Zuckerberg, er, Facebook—or at least continued to use its service.