In the wake a scandal over the conservative Cambridge Analytica’s use of data of Facebook users to help Donald Trump in the 2016 election, Facebook is struggling with transparency issues, balancing the need for protecting their reputation over against the need for truth-telling about how Russia used the platform to influence the election. (The New York Times, March 19, 2018, by Nicole Perlroth, Sheera Frenkel and Scott Shane)
A MIT social media expert, Professor Sinan Aral, is worried about the possible fallout over the Cambridge Analytica affair in that a Cambridge University researcher who was trusted with Facebook data for academic study illegally gave the data of 50 million users to the company. With increased pressure for security, Facebook may now be more guarded about sharing its data with those studying the impact of social media on society. (MIT Technology Review, March 20, 2018, by Martin Giles)
Facebook critics have long pressured the company to make its data more open. “It should let outsiders audit its data and peer around inside with a flashlight. But it was an excess of openness with developers—and opaque privacy practices—that got the company in trouble here. Facebook tightened up third-party access in 2015, meaning an exact replay of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco couldn’t happen today. But if the company decides to close down even further, then what happens to the researchers doing genuinely important work using the platform? How well can you vet intentions?” write Nicholas Thompson and Fred Bogelstein in Wired, March 20, 2018.