Facebook follies

Oscar Wilde once said: “The only thing I cannot resist is temptation”. Watching and listening to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, being questioned on Capitol Hill in Washington DC was like sitting in at the trial not just of the century but the interrogation of a modern-day messiah.

This is no exaggeration: here we were witnessing a man defend the organisation he created from an idea in his room at college into the world’s largest network of individuals – 2,000 million people connected instantaneously over the internet in just over ten years.

Understandably he claimed that with such dynamic growth it was inevitable that mistakes would be made on the way. Was the abuse of individual information such an inevitable outcome? This particular abuse using “fake news” is being claimed to have resulted in the manipulation of the 2016 US presidential election. Perhaps it wasn’t the Russians after all, it was the unintended effect of Zuckerberg’s brainchild being harnessed by a firm of consultants with a vested interest in the election outcome, a perfect storm of technology and creativity invading the minds and hearts of American voters.

Whilst the immediate beneficiary was the elected candidate, his opponent might have difficulty in refuting that, offered the same strategy, it would have been a temptation too hard to resist!

GAVIN CARGILL Edinburgh Road, Linlithgow