- By now you've probably heard
that Facebook is scrambling to contain
the fallout over a data privacy scandal.
(dramatic music)
Mark Zuckerberg finally addressed the story on Wednesday,
but only after a Delete Facebook campaign
had started to gain momentum around the world.
- So this was a major breach of trust,
and I'm really sorry that this happened.
We have a basic responsibility to protect people's data,
and if we can't do that,
then we don't deserve
to have the opportunity to serve people.
- So how do we get here and how does Facebook recover?
Well, first of all, let's figure out what happened.
So on March 16th, the New York Times
and The Guardian reported that a data mining firm
named Cambridge Analytica,
which had worked on Donald Trump's presidential campaign,
had improperly obtained access
to more than 50 million user profiles.
Experts believe the firm could have used that data
to gain an unfair advantage in targeting voters.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't say anything
about these stories for five days.
And then on Wednesday, he wrote a Facebook post
and gave an interview to CNN.
- [Interviewer] I'm gonna challenge you--
- But we're here now,
- I'm gonna challenge you, have you
done it-- - And we're gonna make sure
that we do a good job at it.
- Have you done a good enough job yet?
- Well, I think we will see.
- This scandal is extremely weird
because we've known the basic details
that Cambridge Analytica got access
to these profiles for more than two years.
It's not clear that the data they obtained
was really all that useful to them,
and the number of profiles that they supposedly
obtained, 50 million, that might turn out
to just be marketing hype from Cambridge Analytica.
Despite all that, this is the biggest
public relations crisis Facebook has faced
since the aftermath of the 2016 election.
Senators are calling on Zuckerberg to testify,
the Federal Trade Commission is investigating,
British authorities are investigating,
and Facebook stock price has been declining.
So let's look at what happened.
The story starts in 2014.
That's when a University of Cambridge researcher
named Aleksandr Kogan created an app
called thisisyourdigitallife.
About 270,000 people downloaded it,
gave away their information,
and Kogan, unbeknownst to them,
passed along that information
to a data mining and political strategy firm,
named Cambridge Analytica.
At the time, Facebook's platform API
let developers like Kogan access information
about your friends as well as yourself.
Christopher Wylie, who used to work
at Cambridge Analytica, told The Times
and The Guardian that that was how his company
was able to get access to information
of as many as 50 million people.
And the idea was, that by gleaning
your Facebook likes, the company could begin
to understand your personality and then,
more effectively target political advertising at you.
This kind of thing is known as psychographic profiling.
Experts say it can be useful at the margins
in persuading voters, but at the same time,
they say its effect can be easily overstated.
Granted, Trump's campaign wasn't the first
to gain information about potential supporters
using Facebook.
In fact, in 2012, President Obama's election team
had created an app and done a very similar thing.
But there was a big difference.
President Obama's team told voters what it was doing.
Cambridge Analytica obtained this information
in total violation of Facebook's rules
and didn't tell anybody who was taking
Kogan's personality quiz that their data would
eventually be used for political advertising targeting.
The Guardian revealed the scheme in 2015.
Facebook went to Kogan and Cambridge Analytica
and demanded that they delete all of the data
that they had obtained in violation of Facebook's rules.
But the reports say that, in reality,
Cambridge Analytica and Kogan never deleted the data,
and Facebook never investigated to see
whether they had deleted the data as promised.
This gets to the heart of why some people
are deleting their Facebook accounts right now.
Facebook made it too easy for developers like Kogan
to get access to their data,
to their friends' data,
and to share it.
And it never informed people
that their data had been improperly used.
The scandal also came at a time
when trust in Facebook has never been lower.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election,
we saw how obviously fake stories
could spread faster and more persuasively
than many true ones.
And we learned that Kremlin-linked groups
had waged a highly effective misinformation campaign
on the platform.
In some cases, even illegally buying ads.
Meanwhile, new research was coming out
showing that just browsing the newsfeed
can make you feel worse about yourself,
and a group of former Facebook executives
came forward and expressed regret
about their part in building
the social network to begin with.
In short, public perception of Facebook
had become a tinderbox.
Not that Tinder.
But the Cambridge Analytica story
was the spark that turned it into a bonfire.
After a long delay, Zuckerberg announced plans
to address abuses like Cambridge Analytica's.
In 2014, Facebook had already stopped developers
from gaining access to information about your friends.
Now it's going a step further.
If you go three months without using an app,
Facebook is gonna cut off developer access
to any information about you.
And for developers that did have access
to all that information, including information
about your friends way back in 2014,
Facebook is going to demand
that they submit to an audit
or be kicked off the platform.
So will this fix the problem?
On one hand, it's a start.
Restricting developer access to your data
could help Facebook start to rebuild some trust.
But the larger issue for Zuckerberg
is that he's really confronting three crises at once.
There's the data privacy issue
that the Cambridge Analytica story reveals.
There's the newsfeed integrity issue
and whether we can trust what we see on Facebook.
And there's the broader cultural reckoning
over social media, how we spend our time there,
and whether it's ultimately good for us and the world.
In January, Zuckerberg said that fixing Facebook's platform
would be his personal challenge for the year.
And yet, as he wades into this latest crisis,
five days after it began,
it's not clear Facebook is doing
everything it can to address it.
And as a Delete Facebook campaign
starts gaining steam around the world,
the challenge of fixing Facebook's platform
feels greater than ever.
(dramatic music)