Mounting bad buzz bruises Facebook
Many have turned sour on social media giant
SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook used to be made of corporate Teflon. Not anymore.
Public outrage is growing over the alleged misuse of the private information of tens of millions of Facebook users by the firm that claimed it helped Donald Trump win the White House. U.S. and European lawmakers demanded hearings, and the Federal Trade Commission and two state attorneys general launched investigations.
“The current political environment surrounding the Trump administration has raised the stakes,” Harvard Business
School professor David Yoffie said.
Before news of a massive data mining operation of Facebook users for political ends broke, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had pledged to spend 2018 trying to fix everything that’s gone wrong. Fabricated news, live broadcasts of homicides and terrorism and Russian manipulation had chipped away at the social network’s reputation.
Then The New York Times and the Observer reported on allegations that British data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained and retained the personal information of 50 million Facebook users without their permission, 30 million of whom had posted enough information to
“The current political environment surrounding the Trump administration has raised the stakes.” David Yoffie Harvard Business School
match them to other records and build profiles of them.
Michael Useem, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said this is a “catastrophic moment” for Facebook and predicted the Cambridge Analytica controversy would be a source of “great public interest and intense scrutiny going forward.”
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg remained silent as lawmakers in the USA and Europe pummeled Facebook and its stock price dropped 9% in two days.
Facebook held a meeting for employees to ask questions of one of the company’s lawyers Tuesday morning, but Zuckerberg, a mainstay at all-hands gatherings, was a no-show.
“Mark, Sheryl and their teams are working around the clock to get all the facts and take the appropriate action moving forward, because they understand the seriousness of this issue,” Facebook said in a statement. “The entire company is outraged we were deceived.”
Facebook disclosed Friday that it knew Cambridge Analytica obtained user information without its consent, but it didn’t verify that the firm had deleted it — and it didn’t notify users.
“They previously thought, as did their constituents and various audiences, that they controlled, owned, managed the processes and the data,” said Peter Crist, chairman of the executive search firm Crist Kolder Associates. “Not so much anymore.”
Facebook said Tuesday it’s committed to “vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information and will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens.”
One unhappy user is Tommy Lei, 29, a menswear fashion blogger from Los Angeles who runs MY BELONGING and uses Facebook to stay in touch with friends and promote his business.
He said the mishandling of Facebook users’ data “in an ulterior and nefarious manner” during the presidential election opened the floodgates for “more potentially manipulative social and digital campaigns in the future.”
According to The New York Times, Facebook downplayed the scope of the problem for a week, questioning whether “any of the data still remained out of its control.” Late Friday, confronted with mounting evidence that it was wrong, the Silicon Valley company put out a blog post that it had received reports that Cambridge Analytica hadn’t deleted the user data and that it had suspended the firm.
A Facebook blog post on Monday that Cambridge Analytica agreed to an independent audit had to be walked back when the auditors ceased work on orders from the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office, which is pursuing its own investigation.
Facebook said Friday a British researcher and his firm, Global Science Research, legitimately gained access to the personal data of Facebook users in 2013 while working on a personality prediction app, but the researcher violated Facebook’s rules by passing it on
“The entire company is outraged we were deceived.” Facebook statement
to Cambridge Analytica.
Cambridge Analytica, backed by Trump donor and hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, was asked in December to turn over documents to special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The Trump campaign denied using voter data from Cambridge Analytica, saying it relied on data from the Republican National Committee, but it made use of some of the firm’s staff.
In 2015, Facebook learned the researcher broke its policies by passing on the information to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook said it was assured the information had been deleted.
“Had they fessed up and fixed it months ago, it would have not been a big deal. They might even have been viewed in a positive light. But pretending it would go away meant the lid blew off right when it collided with the evergrowing turmoil around the special counsel,” Silicon Valley analyst Paul Saffo said.