I watched the four hours of gruelling footage of American senators lampooning Mark Zuckerberg so you don't have to. Here is my take on the Facebook & Cambridge Analytica scandal.
I sent an email yesterday to James Patterson (best selling crime and thriller writer) with a great new idea for a novel that I think he could work wonders with. The story is as follows; A Russian diplomat and his daughter get poisoned on British soil but they survive. A war of words between the East and the West follows shortly. As a backdrop to all this, one of the biggest tech companies in the world is embroiled in a data scandal that claims to have had an effect on one British referendum and one American election. Diplomats are pointing fingers in every which way, while Russia sits back (topless) on its horse, laughing.
I haven’t had a reply from the very busy Mr James Patterson, but when I do, I suspect it will read something like this, ‘I don’t deal with cold war fiction, it’s a saturated market’.
The non-fictional nature of that which I have detailed above is astounding. Increasingly, the political world in which we are living in seems to be reaching a boiling point of tensions. The issue of the Facebook data scandal is the biggest breach of consumer trust this century. At the same time, the court proceedings in which the American government is questioning Mark Zuckerberg is the most farcical court trial since Barry Roux tried to convince an entire nation that Oscar Pistorius did not shoot Reeva Steenkamp.
There are 3 main problems with the American State’s questioning of Mark Zuckerberg which happened on the 10th and 11th of April, and I’ve put myself through watching the four hours of gruelling footage so you don’t have to. The first issue was the senators lack of desire to punish Zuckerberg and their belief in him. The term ‘exemplar of the American dream’ was thrown around constantly, and every single time it landed at the feet of Zuckerberg. The panel of senators were all convinced that Mr Zuckerberg was not the bad guy, and the fact that he started a multi-billion dollar company from his Harvard dorm room was a star spangled shield protecting him from any wrongdoing. John Thune, the Republican chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee started his line of questioning with this, ‘You and the company you have created…represent the American dream’, which is like telling a naughty schoolboy that the school needs more kids like him.
The second issue with the hearing is the most entertaining yet tragic. The technological knowledge of some of the senators was farcical, with at least half of them failing to grasp the basic purpose of Facebook. My favourite example was Senator Orrin Hatch’s grasp of how Facebook turns a profit.
He asked, ‘How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your services?’.
An awkward pause filled the courtroom and any seriousness was immediately drained from the situation.
‘Senator, we run ads…’ Zuckerberg trailed off nervously, obviously withholding a grin.
The situation at the hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday was akin to a panel of Hindus quizzing a Rabbi on the laws of Kosher. Many Hindus, I might add, stick to a vegetarian diet anyway. This farcical line of questioning has achieved the most publicity, draining a lot of the importance and gravity of the situation away.
The third issue is the misplacement of blame. Ever since the 2016 presidential election there has been rising palpable tension on a global scale. People were pointing fingers at Russia, rightly so, yet we as a Western conglomerate of similar ideologies had no way of punishing Russia. Now, the lawmakers have a target within their sites which they can release the tension of the last 2 years on, Cambridge Analytica, the company which is charged with stealing the data of 87 million users.
This is wrong. Cambridge Analytica should be punished, what they have done is illegal. However, there is a bigger issue at hand. The accessibility of this data is something that needs to be made much harder. Zuckerberg in the Tuesday hearing said that at the time he found out that Cambridge Analytica was stealing data, he did not issue harsher repercussions because, and I quote, ‘we don’t know what Cambridge Analytica has done with this data’. I take great issue with this and see it as an ignorance of responsibility on behalf of Zuckerberg and Facebook. When a shipment of weapons is stolen, the police don’t withhold their investigation until a crime has been committed; the theft is crime enough and deserves repercussions.
What needs to follow this scandal is much more protection for people’s personal data and the ability for them to completely block social sites from possessing it. This way we can stop the shipment of weapons from getting stolen in the first place. It is Zuckerberg’s responsibility, as leader of the worlds biggest social media platform, to set the standards for data protection, and following a punishment of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, I hope he does this.
This article was also featured on The Broad, a free speech platform created by students in Edinburgh - http://thebroadonline.com
