You wouldn’t expect it from such a popular website, but Facebook has been at the center of some major scandals. In fact, over the past few years, I don’t know if there has been another company that has had more negative media attention. The fact is, if you use Facebook, you are giving them a lot of your information. Probably a lot more than you realize. They obtain it when you first open your profile, when you post about stuff, like things, etc.
Over the past few years, the company has experienced multiple scandals of various types. I give you the top 3 Facebook scandals so far.
● Privacy Concerns
It’s about time to get to the center of the scandals. Facebook’s biggest, most publicized scandals all have to do with privacy concerns, and no, we’re not talking about the famous Facebook tracking software story.
In 2014, Aleksandar Kogan and his company ‘Global Science Research’ created a Facebook app ‘This Is Your Digital Life. It was pretty much a personality test. The motivation behind it was to collect data from people because data like that is valuable. It can be used to determine how to most effectively advertise to certain people.
Data was so valuable that Kogan was willing to pay about 270 thousand people on Facebook to take this test. It was simple for the users: you download the app, answer some questions and make some money. Yet, he wasn’t collecting the information from the survey itself only. Facebook allowed him to access the information of anybody who took it. Depending on the privacy settings, the information of their Facebook friends as well.
Less than 300 thousand people took the survey. He was able to collect information from over 87 million people, as Facebook estimated.
When you look at the situation, it’s unclear if Kogan violated any of Facebook’s terms of service. Either way, allowing someone to collect that much data did not reflect well on Facebook.
And then, there is another layer to this. Kogan later sold the data to the company called ‘Cambridge Analytica’. They are famous for using data like that to target voters. Their intention is to influence elections.
● Discrimination
In 2019, HUD sued Facebook claiming that they violated the Fair Housing act. Ben Carson stated ‘ Facebook is discriminating against people based on who they are and where they live.’. Facebook is looking at someone’s gender and race, among other things, and determining which ads to show them. When those ads involve housing, that can become discriminatory.
● Myanmar
In Myanmar, there is an ethnic minority Muslim group of people called Rohingya. They are facing terrible discrimination, kindly spoken. The terms ethnic cleansing and genocide are the descriptions of what’s happening. Well, Facebook is popular over there with millions of users. It’s one of the main ways of sharing false news and hateful speech against them by politicians and the public. UN investigators determined that Facebook has played a role in it. They have later promised to do more when it comes to reviewing and controlling what is said over there.
I realize that this is a high-level summary of the situation. All I’m trying to convey is that Facebook has been criticized for its role in potential genocide. That is a pretty big scandal.
These are just a couple of many more scandals that Facebook has experienced over the past decade. How would you react if you found out the survey you took for a couple of bucks actually manipulated elections? Knowing all this, Facebook is in serious danger of running out of users. Will you keep your profile after reading this article? Do what you think it’s best, but try to be careful.