Greg's Corner

New issues show Facebook’s loss of control

Facebook has exploded into the news this week with a number of issues that show how problematic the popular platform has become. The first issue for Facebook was when they announced the deletion of a number of profiles and pages that were from Russia and Iran designed to spread false and inflammatory information into the US and other Western countries. Facebook says they deleted 652 pages, groups, and accounts. While it’s commendable that Facebook removed these accounts, this is only a symptom in a larger problem of continuous foreign influence in Western Democracy.

Secondly, Facebook announced that, in a move similar to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, four million users may have had their personal data compromised. Facebook has banned an app called MyPersonality, a personality quiz as you can probably surmise. Even though four million users is a drop in the bucket of Facebook’s billions of users worldwide, that’s still a significant number of users whose personal information may have been exposed. While it’s an improvement over the 87 million accounts exposed in the Cambridge Analytica kerfuffle, Facebook seems like it’s still leaking like a sieve with our information.

Lastly, and probably the most damning, the New York Times published an expose on a study that has linked Facebook use to anti-refugee violence in Germany. While the study doesn’t blame Facebook per se, it does allege that Facebook use paired with engagement into hate-filled rhetoric has resulted in a rise in hate-related violence. What concerns me most about this study is how much Facebook hate-crimes based on ethnicity or religion are coming closer and closer to the US. In today’s charged political climate, how long will it be before Facebook lynch mobs finally leave their keyboards and start taking to the streets?

Facebook has become a virus that has escaped the lab and is creeping through the world’s population and by continuing to rely so heavily on it we’re willingly ignoring the cure.