You would need a heart of stone not to find the disintegration of the Australian cricket team utterly hilarious. The captain, the vice-captain, a batsman and even the coach have all resigned with tearful apologies. Their crime? Tampering with a cricket ball, in the hope that it might deviate in flight. Even though a battery of cameras with long lenses were surrounding the boundary, the batsman set to work on the ball with a piece of sandpaper. When the television cameras spotted he was up to something, he hid the sandpaper down his trousers and pretended he had nothing in his pockets but a cloth to clean his sunglasses. Later in the day, the captain tried to shrug it off with a laugh. He had discussed it with the ‘leadership team’ he said, and that was the end of the matter. He had a point. Ball tampering has a long and dishonorable history, but few people get sacked for it. At worst, they get a reprimand, possibly a match fine. But we live in a different world. By the time the captain woke up in South Africa, the Australian prime minister had already given an interview criticizing his actions in strong terms. The Twittersphere went bonkers. And within 24 hours, the captain and vice-captain were banned from cricket for a year, sent back to Australia, and live on television, blubbed like babies. Such apologies – tears are optional – are straight out of any crisis communications playbook. Tim Bell, the founder of Bell Pottinger and the figure widely credited with inventing crisis communications (before he himself blew up the company he had given his name to), would have advised the following: Admit the mistake, accept responsibility if not blame, apologize profusely, and promise to behave better in the future. Convention demands that it is the top person in the firm who faces the camera. Most manage to tough it out; very few find that public opinion forces them out. If it weren’t so funny watching cricketers crying, you could almost feel sorry for them. Among the crocodile tears, as their sponsors abandoned them and even the Indian Premier League teams tore up their million dollar contracts, you could see their accountants in the background banging their calculators and realizing that collectively they had probably lost potentially $10 million in missed earnings. In another part of the world, another young man saw his company lose some $50 billion, and as he is the biggest shareholder, saw his personal fortune diminish by about $20 billion. His crime – if that is not too strong a word for it – was to allow people’s personal data be used by a cunning marketing firm to help President Donald Trump win an election. Not only does Facebook know every little intimate detail of all its users, but it has been willing to share them for a fee. Rupert Wright Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, which has repeatedly assured all its millions of users that our data is safe with them, turned out to be leaking like a sieve. Not only does Facebook know every little intimate detail of all its users, but it has been willing to share them for a fee. In the circumstances, you would expect a textbook response from Facebook: A teary strong apology, maybe some resignations or even better, defenestrations. After all, they probably spend many millions a year on PR advisers. Instead, Zuckerberg fiddled while Facebook crashed and burned. It kept sending out messages to its users, but not a hint of remorse. Eventually Zuckerberg pitched up with full page advertisements in newspapers – a nice if relatively insignificant payback for old media, after years of seeing its business model and revenue eroded by his firm. “I promise to do better for you,” read the ad. As an apology, this was too little and too late. Regulators, particularly in Europe, will feel emboldened to act. Just as they neutered Microsoft’s monopoly a decade ago, any ambitious lawmaker will feel they can take down Facebook’s hegemony. Missing in this episode was one person: Sheryl Landberg. She was the person hired by Facebook to be the reassuring, matronly figure. The weirdo tech boys could do their stuff, but she would be on hand to ensure they did no wrong. She even wrote a book aimed at encouraging other women to ‘Lean In’. While I was never quite clear what that meant, it became a bestseller and she became a billionaire. Where has she been all week? Shouldn’t she have been on our screens, phones and tablets, soothing us with her bedside manner that this was a blip, an anomaly? That contrary to all available evidence, we should trust Facebook and every other tech firms? Sadly for us, and perhaps even more so for Facebook shareholders, she chose to ‘lean out’. She eventually surfaced on CNBC and told them: “Sometimes, and I would say certainly this past week, we speak too slowly. If I could live this past week again, I would definitely have had Mark and myself out speaking earlier.” Indeed. But it’s too late now. When an individual or a company is faced with a crisis, while the temptation is either to cover up, lie or say nothing, few things work as well as an admission of guilt and a swift apology. Resignations are optional, sometimes essential, as three cricketers found to their cost. But ultimately Facebook shareholders will be the ones crying. Rupert Wright is the former chairman of Edelman Middle East. He is chairman of Ashbright, a communications consultancy with offices in Dubai and London.