We Must Recognize Facebook's Impact on our Lives
On Tuesday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate in Washington, D.C.. He was asked to do so after the recent revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm with connections to the Trump campaign, had gathered the data of 87 million Facebook users to “psychologically profile” voters during the 2016 election. When Facebook found out about Cambridge Analytica’s wrongdoing, they didn’t immediately ban the company from receiving user data and using it for advertising benefits until later on.
Now, Facebook is undergoing seismic waves of change. This includes the posts from your closest friends and family now appearing at the top of your newsfeed, while ads from brands and publications will appear later.
This change is much needed and long overdue—it fulfills Facebook’s original intention of bringing people closer together, of allowing friends and family members who may live far away from each other to not let their physical boundaries stop them from staying connected.
Plus, commercials don’t really add any value to our lives, or help us stay connected. More often than not, they are just graphics we mindlessly scroll past in order to reach the posts that we actually want to read. Occasionally, l'm pestered by the repeated ads for things I have no intention of ever buying, but the aforementioned change will help to significantly improve that as well our general online experience.
Due to the enormous amounts of pressure from politicians as well as the public, Facebook is finally adopting the measures needed to benefit the greater good. Besides the shift in post order, Facebook Inc. also backed a proposed legislation necessitating social media websites to reveal the identities of people who purchase political campaign ads online.
According to Zuckerberg, Facebook is also utilizing new tools with artificial intelligence in order to shut down fake accounts, verifying political advertisers and launching ad transparency tools. These are exactly the kind of actions that we need from one of the biggest social media platforms in the world– it should be contributing to a sense of connectedness as well as strengthening the values of American democracy, as opposed to undermining them.
No one ever thought that a social media site, founded only fourteen years ago, would be capable of exerting such an influence on the presidential election of arguably the most powerful country in the world.
Two billion people log into Facebook monthly, and one billion people within that number are considered daily active users; many, if not all of these people, are influenced by what they see on their feed.
Facebook is finally admitting to its failure in regulating political campaigns from manipulating users; although Facebook’s lack in regulation should never have been a problem in the first place, taking action now is better than never taking action at all.
Facebook’s vast power is undeniable, and is only predicted to keep growing in the years to come. However, with power comes responsibility and the people behind Facebook must be willing to confront the challenges hindering them from fulfilling that responsibility.