Facebook has been sealed into a state of major user distrust. The social media giant started to drop its stock market drastically in early 2018, influenced largely in part by the Cambridge Analytica exposé that revealed that they had been mining data from Facebook for President Trump’s electoral campaign. This triggered an unfortunate series of events for Zuckerberg’s company.
This scandal also confirmed the Russian link with the whole election affair. The New York Times reported that the Russian oil company Lukoil, which happens to be linked directly with the Kremlin, was in fact involved in talks with Cambridge Analytica’s British affiliate SCL, as Cambridge built on Facebook’s case. These sources confirmed Lukoil’s’ interest in the ways data was manipulated to target American voters.
Facebook enables privacy violations of user data
Following the Cambridge Analytica report came a series of campaigns to get Facebook out of the internet, supported by several personalities and founders of other social media sites to give more presence to the #deletefacebook movement. The initiative prompts people to delete their Facebook accounts based on the argument that this would make users less stressed in their daily routines.
Facebook, through the whole ordeal, has been facing public dislike. A few weeks ago it became a public concern the amount of data that is stored by the social media platform, and congressmen in the U.S have called on Zuckerberg to issue a statement regarding the numerous violations of privacy that have been made by Facebook.
Facebook’s responses are not enough
The largest social media platform has made public statements about its privacy rules, stating that the company allows access to user data when it comes to academic purposes. However, once the information is distributed to marketers or political firms, whoever dealt the data information will be suspended from Facebook.
Facebook has issued a series of responses in order to redeem itself in the public eye. The company has had radical political pages banned due to a more strict enforcement of their rules. Along with banning, Facebook has also made more announcements of their rules of usage through their official newsroom, while also taking action by suspending firms that don’t comply with said policies.
For example, recently the social media giant suspended the data analytics firm CubeYou for sharing user information to marketing companies. This violated Facebook’s privacy boundaries. These types of actions have been made intending to clear the company’s name, yet for many people, Facebook is not to be forgiven.