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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Black year: Facebook’s battle for credibility

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2018 was the year when Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg lost their shine. In the past it had often seemed like the social network’s problems, such as its failure to protect users’ data or shield them from hate speech and disinformation campaigns, would leave behind no lasting damage. There was of course much anger, however, Facebook continued to gain new members and it advertising business grew rapidly. 2017, the year when Facebook apologised for the Russian campaign targeting the US elections that sent Donald Trump to the White House, had seemed like a one-off. Instead, this year saw Zuckerberg apologising many more times.
At the beginning of the year, Facebook attempted to fight back. In January, Zuckerberg made the surprise announcement that users would from then on be seeing more posts from friends on their Facebook feeds, and less from other Facebook feeds they were following. The move was an attempt to promote users’ wellness — they would not only be seeing less cat videos in future, but also less of other types of media.
It was also intended as a way of avoiding a repeat of the 2016 election mess — less political content meant in theory that fake and propagandist users would be less likely to influence voters.
After the many years in which Facebook had tried to attract companies, media, influencers, filmmakers and so on, to the network, the move was seen as a change in direction.
Zuckerberg told the New York Times: “It’s important to me that when (my daughters) Max and August grow up that they feel like what their father built was good for the world.” Never before had the billionaire, who rarely displays his emotions, revealed such concern for his legacy.
The storm hanging over Facebook seemed to clear before an even more damaging episode broke: the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Facebook admitted to improperly sharing the personal data of millions of users to the company, which used the data in 2016 to support the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union as well as DonaldTrump’s White House bid. The fact that Facebook knew about the misses of its data since late 2015, but seemed satisfied by the explanation that it had since been deleted, simply poured fuel onto the fire.
Zuckerberg was made to testify before Congress to explain the data privacy scandal and the abuse of the platform by Russian groups attempting to interfere in elections.
Senator Dick Durbin made the appearance awkward for Zuckerberg. “Would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?” the Democrat asked. “Umm… no,” was Zuckerberg’s response. What followed were multiple apologies: to Congress, to the European parliament, in blog entries and in interviews. — dpa



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