Trust In Zuckerberg Gone

     A thing talked about in the Facebook chapter of this book is an incident that happened a couple years back. In 2018 investigation started because a voter-profiling company, Cambridge Analytica, was able to get access to over 87 million Facebook user's data during the 2016 election. This upset a lot of users and they started to lose trust in Mark Zuckerberg. This upset a lot of users and Mark had lawsuits filed against him and Facebook.

    Mark had to testify in front of Congress about the mishandling of user data. They asked him a series of questions that he appeared to struggle to answer. This upset even more people as there is some valuable information that can be used in a bad way that Facebook was just not caring about. This enabled many people to delete Facebook and bash Mark Zuckerberg online. Facebook addressed this issue by creating an EU General Data Protection Regulation across the entire platform. While this may have solved a little of the problem for Facebook, it also created a bigger one. Now, users find it hard to not only trust Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, but also any trust in social media platform owners was being questioned. This prompted many questions regarding the ethical practices of any social media companies and if they have done this behind users backs without providing any information to the users about giving out or selling their data. Facebook ended up losing more than $119 billion in market value, and now releases a biannual Transparency Report with information about how the company safeguards its data.

    While Facebook was able to bounce back from this incident it never left the minds of its users. That trust was taken away after this incident and some people never redownloaded the app. It makes you think about what data you have and put out there and how quickly it can get sold and used against you. You never know what is going on behind the scenes at these big corporations. I'm not saying to delete all social media and go ghost, but I do think people need to be more aware that this could be happening and be safer with what they post on social media.