Facebook faces ‘Oppenheimer moment’ over

PARIS — Facebook and psychologists who have worked with it are grappling with their “Oppenheimer moment,” experts say, over revelations that its data may have been used to help elect US President Donald Trump.

The scandal over the way Cambridge Analytica obtained personal information to try to manipulate US voters “is the most important moment that Facebook has faced since it went public (in 2012),” according to Professor Andrew Przybylski of Oxford University, one of the world’s leading authorities on social media psychology.

He compared their reluctance to admit the destructive potential of social media to the epiphany of the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, who declared, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

“With Facebook we have to acknowledge we are giving Frodo the Ring,” Mr. Przybylski told AFP, referring to the object in the which confers absolute power.

“If you gave me the Ring I would be corrupted.

“It is not that what is happening at Facebook is by its nature bad,” he added. “It is that they are using our data for products and services, but that we have no idea what they are up to.”

He called for regulation and a new “ethical framework (to ensure) that users’ rights are protected and that research is being done transparently and in the public interest.”

Mr. Przybylski said similar crises had led to the establishment of ethical standards in other areas.

‘FACEBOOK SENSE THREAT’

“Chemistry had this moment after they invented dynamite and chemical weapons, physics had this with nuclear weapons,” he argued.

Facebook and “others have been built on the shoulders of academic research... The key issue is trust. Facebook works one-on-one with psychologists and researchers and there is a fundamental asymmetry there.”

Mr. Przybylski, who has spent two days at Facebook’s San Francisco headquarters, said he told founder Mark Zuckerberg’s chief of staff “Chris Cox all this to his face,” and set out proposals on how Facebook might change the way it works.

“I am optimistic. They are receptive, they have a sense of the threat and they have a proactive mind-set,” said Mr. Przybylski, who no longer uses Facebook himself.

But Google researcher Francois Chollet has his doubts.

In a series of scathing tweets last week the inventor of the Keras open source library said “the problem with Facebook is not ‘ just’ the loss of your privacy and the fact that it can be used as a totalitarian panopticon,” a prison in which all the cells can be observed from one point.

“The more worrying issue is its use of digital information consumption as a psychological control vector.”

Other experts were sceptical that fears about personal information being used to influence users would lead to an exodus from the world’s biggest social network.

But with hashtags like #DeleteFacebook and #ZuckSucks trending even on Facebook itself, they said it had suffered a major blow beyond the billions wiped off its share price.