Frankenstein Facebook returns to haunt its rich creator Zuckerberg
FACEBOOK, the super ego-inflating social media website which has half the world hooked, is hemorrhaging users and shares following the Cambridge Analytica revelations of the past week and I imagine its CEO Mark Zuckerberg is starting to feel like a modern day Dr Frankenstein.
To the casual observer it has been difficult to pinpoint who, exactly, the villains are in this latest intriguing international drama. Is it the Mercer family, the American billionaires who funded Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign? The Russian American Cambridge Analytica creator Aleksandr Kogan? Mark Zuckerberg and the top faces in Facebook? Or Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix who was stung by Channel 4 News in an expertly choreographed set-up.
Hillary Clinton and Democrats are clinging to the belief that information gleaned by Cambridge Analytica found its way into the hands of the Russians who were hell bent, so the story goes, on getting the morally dubious Donald Trump elected, over Hilary Clinton.
all in all it has been tough times for Facebook. WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton last week urged people to delete their Facebook accounts. ‘It is time,’ Acton wrote, adding the hashtag #deletefacebook. Over recent days people have taken to other social media platforms to announce that they were leaving Facebook.
I, for one, am at peak Facebook. As someone in the public firing line, (albeit on the lower rung of this shaky societal ladder), I’m sick to my back teeth of all the (non) news feed updates and the occasional call-outs for a scrap or to join a silly game.
People have been worrying about what they have on their accounts, while the owners have been making money targeting them. ‘If something online is free, you are the product,’ one commentator said last week. How true! Afterall the web is an open market as anyone who has searched for shoes, only to find similar shoes pop up on their Facebook page will attest.
Cambridge Analytica managed to get 250,000 plus Facebook users to fill out a personality test. Once access was gained, the company was able to compile a list of 50 million Facebook user friends, most hailing from America. A company called SCL Group, who boasts of its ability of wage psychological warfare on its target audience, was funded to do just that.
How much of a difference their targeted stories, memes etc had on American voters is debatable, but there was interference in the election, one which was narrowly lost by Clinton.
Kogan is alleged to have built a Facebook app that was the quiz. The company not only collected data from people who took the quiz, (Facebook prohibited the selling of data collected with this method), but Cambridge Analytica sold the data anyway.
Raw personal material about tens of millions of Facebook users was left exposed by the company to be harvested by Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, smarting from a $50 billion loss in his company’s shares, wrote in a response to this scandal, “I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.’
Money talks so I’m watching this space.