By Pascal Oparada
Over the weekend, Facebook was the subject of damning reports which claimed that a company linked to Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, used Facebook to harvest the data of 50 million users which may have influenced the outcome of the U.S. elections in 2016.
A whistleblower revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica, owned by Robert Mercer, with Steve Bannon as head, used personal information without authorisation in 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, so as to target them for personlised advertisement.
Facebook confirmed the story and subsequently suspended Cambridge Analytica from the network.
On Tuesday, March 20, 2018, CNBC reported that Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has been summoned by the UK parliament to give evidence of Facebook’s links with Cambridge Analytica.
“Facebook’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has now become a political football, with lawmakers increasingly up in arms, says Digiday, a tech analytic company.
According to Digiday, A lawmaker in the U.K. wants Zuckerberg to testify before a parliamentary committee. And the attorney general of Massachusetts is also investigating.
While many publishers, and not a few marketers, enjoy watching Facebook squirm, the overall risk goes up to the broader ecosystem when politicians are incentivized to “do something.” What that something would be is unclear, but regulation of advert targeting, once a fringe idea, is appearing far more possible, Digiday said.
So far, Zuckerberg has been silent on the issue but U.K. lawmakers want to hear from him. Damian Collins, a member of parliament, sent a letter to Zuckerberg requesting that he appears in front of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.
Early in 2018, Facebook announced that it would prioritise user content over publishers, companies and brands on its News Feed.
This, according to Zuckerberg, is to curtail the rise of fake news which have exploded on the network.
It is alleged that the opposition party in Nigeria, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), engaged a foreign firm, SCL, to manipulate the electoral process in 2015. This was featured in a documentary released by BBC’s Channel 4.
The documentary reveals how Analytica has been influencing election results all over the world using data harvested from Facebook.
