IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR FACEBOOK?
Last week’s Observer investigation struck at the heart of social media with its revelations, but will it prove the wake-up call needed to regulate the internet? Wired contributor Nicole Kobie reports…
a pink- haired whistleblower, hidden-camera confessions and regime-changing propaganda. Data privacy stories aren’t normally plotted like a spy thriller, but this had it all. Last week’s blizzard of revelations about campaign meddling by Cambridge Analytica (CA) can seem difficult to relate to. But there is a high chance that your personal data – everything from photos of your night out to furious Facebook rants – could have been used to influence both the Brexit referendum and the Trump election.
Those Facebook quizzes – Which Disney princess are you? Which sandwich represents your dating life? – aren’t just dumb, they’re dangerous. In 2015, Cambridge Analytica recruited researcher Aleksandr Kogan (who maintains that CA assured him the process was legal) who had developed an app based on those personality quizzes, called this is your digital life. While asking seemingly inane questions, the app slurped up your entire friend list and their profile data. So, even if you didn’t install it, one of your friends may well have. Data was collected on more than 50 million Facebook users and passed on to CA.
‘Facebook’s business model is about the manipulation of people, through methods of gathering and processing data that are out of sight and out of control – both to the people involved and any authorities,’ says Eerke Boiten, professor of cyber security at De Montfort University. ‘ There is a serious chance that the manipulation CA have done is the most far-reaching of all so far.’
Founded by US billionaire Robert Mercer and ex-breitbart editor and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, CA used this data to target people with personalised propaganda. They also worked under the radar before elections in Nigeria, Kenya and Argentina. According to a former CA employee, pink-haired Canadian whistleblower Christopher Wylie, this propaganda then appeared in people’s newsfeeds as normal-looking non-campaign blog posts, as well as campaign Youtube videos saying if ‘crooked Hillary’ were to be elected, she would be the first president to go to jail.
Hidden camera footage from a Channel 4
investigation then showed CA staff not only bragging that the company had helped Trump win, but also detailing political bribes and honeytraps. However, the success of CA’S influence on campaigns is difficult to prove and they deny any wrongdoing.
Has last week’s global outrage, sparked by this breach of trust, proved a tipping point for us to take back control of our privacy on social media? Soon after the revelations, #Deletefacebook started to trend on Twitter, showing what social media users thought of Mark Zuckerberg’s failure to address the issue for five days. When he did eventually emerge – his company’s stock having dropped by 7% – Zuckerberg apologised and promised to change app data sharing, saying, ‘ There’s more to do and we need to step up and do it.’
All this suggests that change is looming, but it may be difficult to hold those responsible to account, and it’s unlikely any election results will be overturned. Sir Tim Berners-lee, the inventor of the world wide web, said last week that this is a ‘pivotal moment’, calling for Zuckerberg to get to work fixing social media.
‘Facebook will make some changes,’ predicts Boiten, ‘and be quite vocal about that, but it will remain broadly business as usual.’ However, he adds, ‘I don’t think he [ Zuckerberg] will get away with pretending to be naive about the power of the machine he controls any longer.’