Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg goes before Congress today to “apologize” for allowing Russians to hijack his website and “influence the 2016 election” by targeting users for inflammatory or misleading stories. I would much rather that he go in with a defiant attitude and place the “blame” for what happened at the feet of those who are ultimately at fault: his users.
When you have signed up for any social media site, shopping app, map site or messaging app have you ever fully read the terms of use agreement? Nearly all of the popular apps and social media platforms warn you that your activities will be monitored, stored and can be provided to third parties willing to purchase it from them. You really didn’t think that Facebook and Twitter made enough money to stay in business from the ads that show up in your time line did you? They are merely data services with some fun distractions to keep you coming back up front.
All of the data that was “misused” in 2016 was provided to President Obama’s campaign in 2012. The difference is that the Committee to Re-elect asked for it from Facebook through proper channels–while Cambridge Analytica got it through a third-party app that Facebook users voluntarily downloaded that gathered their information along with that of their friends and their friends’ friends and so on and so on. Did you get a notice from Facebook in 2012 that specific ads and “newslinks” were being posted on your feed to “influence” that election? That’s why if I’m Mark Zuckerberg, I’m up there today saying “read the fine print, suckers”.
And then there is the idea that everyone believes everything that is posted on their Facebook feeds. Again, Zuckerberg needs to point out that smallest amount of critical thinking–and additional fact-checking by his users–could have made the Russian misinformation campaign pointless. Instead, we have becoming a society where anything we hear that bolsters our personal beliefs is true–and anything that challenges our thinking is “fake news”. The only fault that Facebook could bear is serving as another avenue for people to feed their own mistaken beliefs–but what form of media has’t become that?
If he wasn’t a flaming liberal that believes the Government should provide some form of false security for every citizen, I’d also expect Zuckerberg to defy Congressional calls for oversight of social media. But it sounds like he is going to come before the committees begging Congress to “help protect his users” from becoming “victims” again. But just when it comes to political advertising on his site–not the thousands of regular advertisers that bombard his users based upon the same information that he sells to them. You know, Socialism is great only up to a certain point for the liberal elite.
