The Facebook Scandals

[Music] on the surface you wouldn't expect it coming from such a fun popular website but facebook has definitely been at the center of some pretty major scandals in fact over the past few years i don't know if there's been another company that has had more negative media attention especially in 2018 that was the height of everything it seemed like every week there was something new and things just kept getting worse and worse the fact is if you use facebook you are giving them a lot of your information probably way more than you realize they obtain it when you first open your profile when you post about stuff when you like things now we would hope that they are keeping that information secure what i'm trying to say is if i post something about my new pets i don't want that information to be somehow sold and used to manipulate an election i know it sounds absurd but based on previous events that is now something that concerns many people over the past few years facebook has experienced one major scandal involving privacy concerns multiple smaller scandals that fit within that same category and then some other scandals that have nothing to do with privacy and i'm going to start with a couple of those first off discrimination i'm talking about this in the context of the advertisements that you see on facebook because in 2019 they were sued by the department of housing and urban development part of the trump administration claiming that they violated the fair housing act according to secretary ben carson facebook is discriminating against people based on who they are and where they live they're essentially saying that facebook is looking at someone's gender and race among other things and determining which ads to show them and when those ads involve housing that can potentially violate the law and become discriminatory moving on to another source of negative press which would be myanmar this is an upsetting thing to talk about but here we go there is a country in southeast asia called myanmar and within that country there's an ethnic minority muslim group of people called rohingya who are facing terrible discrimination to put it lightly it's to a point where the terms ethnic cleansing and genocide have been used to describe what's happening just the military killing people and wiping out villages you get the picture well facebook unfortunately has been involved in this the whole platform is really popular over there with millions of users and has actually been one of the main ways that false news and hateful speech against them has been shared by the public and by politicians the un investigators have determined that facebook has played a role in it the company itself has pretty much acknowledged it what's happening in myanmar is a terrible tragedy and we need to do more we all agree with that okay they have since promised to do more when it comes to reviewing and controlling what is said over there i realize that this is an absurdly high level summary of the situation but for today all i'm trying to convey is that facebook has been criticized for their role in a potential genocide that is a pretty big scandal alright i wanted to mention those two to prove that their scandals have some variety but i think it's time that we got to the center of it facebook's biggest most publicized arguably their most impactful scandals all have to do with privacy concerns in 2014 alexander kogan and his company called global science research created this facebook app called this is your digital life it was pretty much a personality test the entire motivation behind it was to collect data from people because data like that is valuable it can be used to determine how to most effectively advertise to certain people you know it's like if you have a friend that knows everything about you they'd likely be much more effective in persuading you to do something over a complete stranger it's really kind of creepy when you think about it especially in this case so because the data was valuable alexander kogan was willing to pay about 270 000 people on facebook to take this test it was simple enough for the user you download the app answer some questions about yourself and make some money by doing it well here's where it became an issue he wasn't collecting information from just the survey itself i've already pointed out just how much information facebook has about all of their users the fact that this survey was done through facebook allowed him to access information from the profile of anybody who took it and depending on the privacy settings the information from anybody that they were friends with so even though the survey was taken by less than 300 000 people it's been estimated by facebook that he was able to collect data from as many as 87 million people most of which were in the united states and really when you look into the specifics of the whole thing it's unclear if kogan even violated any of facebook's terms of service i guess their biggest defense is that he lied in saying that the survey was for research purposes rather than commercial but either way allowing someone to collect data from 87 million people did not reflect well upon facebook and then there is another layer to this making it even potentially more significant once kogan had all of that data he sold it to a company called cambridge analytica who could easily take over this whole video but i'm going to keep it short and say that they've been known to use data like that to target voters with the intention of influencing elections and in violation of our policies and in violation of people's expectations sold it to a third party firm to cambridge analytica in this case now from this point it gets touchy because everything becomes very political and debated so i encourage everyone to look further into it and form your own conclusions but i will say that cambridge analytica and this data obtained from facebook has reportedly been linked to the 2016 presidential campaigns of ted cruz and donald trump in addition to the brexit vote so not only did facebook let all of this information out there it was then potentially used as a tool to influence major elections again not reflecting well upon facebook the biggest consequence from the whole thing for facebook was a massive loss of trust they had to combat it by of course addressing and strengthening their privacy controls and data security but also a good old-fashioned apology campaign centered around their founder and ceo mark zuckerberg whether you believe everything he says or not that's up to you but it involved mostly taking responsibility for what happened and owning up to the mistakes when he appeared at that now famous senate hearing he opened up with an apology and that was a big mistake and it was my mistake and i'm sorry he even took out all of these full-page ads in newspapers saying we have a responsibility to protect your information if we can't we don't deserve it a sentence that is hard to disagree with as far as the financial consequences from its i wouldn't say there's been anything too significant to them it did spark this big hashtag delete facebook movement even brian acton co-founder of whatsapp who is now owned by facebook was tweeting it but fortunately for facebook it seems like there were far more people talking about doing it than actually doing it according to mark zuckerberg i don't think we've seen a meaningful number of people act on that but you know it's not good looking at the stock market there really hasn't been a long-term effect but there were a couple of significant moments in march of 2018 christopher wiley a former employee of cambridge analytica came forward to expose all of the stuff that was happening over there that led to a significant decline in facebook's stock price including an 8 percent drop in one day then in july of 2018 they reported disappointing earnings and said that their revenue growth will likely slow down as they address their privacy concerns that was a combination of factors that caused their stock price to drop 19 in one day losing almost 120 billion dollars in market cap which turned out to be the biggest single day loss ever for a public company can you imagine losing over 100 billion dollars in one day and then they broke another record in 2019 when the ftc imposed a 5 billion penalty an amount like that was unheard of because it was 20 times larger than any previous penalty like it so you would think or at least hope but that with all of this media attention and promises to do better that they would you know do better i mean this is a time where any other even minor privacy issue will be judged very harshly by the public and i'm sorry to say that things just kept happening highlighting a few of them in september of 2018 there was a security breach that gave hackers access to the names phone numbers and email addresses among other information to an initially estimated 50 million facebook users which was later reduced to 30 million still a very high number also from around that time there were these two guys from ukraine who allegedly ran this scam also involving collecting data through surveys and using it for targeted advertisements it's thought to have been connected to this other thing where 81 000 private messages from the site were put up for sale but it's not thought to be tied to the software bug that exposed the photos of up to 6.8 million facebook users oh my gosh in march of 2019 they learned that they weren't masking the passwords of hundreds of millions of users employees from facebook had access to this database where they were supposed to be stored in a way where they couldn't be read but they were in fact just stored in regular text that anybody can read it does look like they caught it before anything bad happened but we can go ahead and add it to the list of privacy concerns that understandably makes the public very uneasy about using facebook let me know in the comments does all of this concern you and if it does does it concern you enough to stop using facebook what i'm trying to ask is if you've been keeping up with all of these scandals as they happened at any point was it enough to convince you to delete your account or on the other end if you just now learned about a lot of it from watching this video are you now considering deleting your facebook account i am realizing how that may have sounded so i feel like this is a good time to point out that i am not trying to get anyone to delete their facebook account that was not my intention of making this video as always i'm trying to deliver everything as objective as possible however i do think that it is important to at least know about all of this and have it factor into your decision regarding if or how you use facebook and finally what do you see for them in the future will any of this harm them in the long term can their reputation ever fully recover what do you think will be the long lasting effects and any other thoughts you have about facebook or any of these scandals associated with them leave them in the comments i'd like to hear what you have to say thank you for watching you

Channel: Company Man

Views: 303,786

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Id: OCHHQqF-Pnc

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020