What the commentators said
What a fall from grace for Zuckerberg, said Josie Cox in The Independent. For years, he has been hailed as “a visionary leader”. There was even talk of him running for president. But now the 33-year-old, who took five days to respond to the latest crisis, risks becoming “nothing more than the face of a sprawling, data-gathering machine with a budding reputation for favouring profits over ethics”. Zuckerberg has promised to put things right, said Will Oremus on Slate, but no amount of tweaks to Facebook’s privacy policies can get round the fact that the company’s “core business model” is built on exploiting users’ personal data.
If that bothers people, said Liz Peek on The Hill, there’s an easy solution: they can stop using Facebook. Consumer choice will rein in the company’s practices more effectively than state intervention. That might be true in a thriving, competitive market, said Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post, but the sheer dominance of Facebook and other tech giants is crowding out newcomers. “In Silicon Valley, new start-ups don’t even pretend that they will become independent companies. Their business plan is to be acquired by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft or Apple.” That’s one good reason to cut the tech giants down to size.
Another is their negative effect on political discourse, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. The latest Facebook scandal has highlighted how data can be exploited to target individuals with political messages disguised to appear like “the organic word of the crowd itself”. In the words of a Cambridge Analytica executive, unwittingly caught on film: “We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow… it’s unattributable, untrackable.” That’s the worst thing about the trend towards “micro-targeting” voters, said Jamie Bartlett in The Spectator. It not only “chips away at the idea of a shared public sphere”, but diminishes accountability. Personalised messages can get away with being more provocative, and more deliberately polarising, than a campaign message printed on a public billboard that everyone can see and talk about.
A former Vote Leave activist has claimed that the official Brexit campaign exceeded legal spending limits by channelling money through a different group. In order not to exceed the £7m limit in the run-up to the 2016 referendum, Vote Leave donated £625,000 to Beleave. That was not illegal. However, Shahmir Sanni (pictured), who worked as a volunteer for both organisations, claims that Vote Leave continued to control how the money was spent, which would amount to illegal collusion. Most of the donation, he says, went to the digital marketing company used by Vote Leave, Aggregateiq, which has links to data firm Cambridge Analytica. Vote Leave denies the claims and says the donation was approved by the Electoral Commission. Sanni also criticised Vote Leave manager Stephen Parkinson, his former boyfriend and now an adviser to Theresa May, for outing him as gay – thus endangering his relatives in Pakistan. Parkinson says that he had to reveal that they were in a relationship in order to defend himself against Sanni’s claims.