It sounds far from reassuring when the founding head of the world’s largest social media platform testifies before the United States Senate that his company is committed to maintaining the integrity of elections across the world, including India, the country with the most elaborate electoral exercises.
The question that indeed arises is why he needed to make such a pledge in the first place. Evidently, online social networking companies like Facebook, whose chief executive and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was the one called for the Congressional hearing, wield power and influence well beyond bringing people together to chat with one another.
“This is my top priority for 2018,” Zuckerberg added in his testimony, seeking to calm India’s vast electorate where the key southern state of Karnataka will go to the polls in May. Facebook, with 2.1 billion active users who give it a global usage penetration of 23 per cent, is the biggest and most popular social network on the web, and is headquartered rather incongruously at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California. In July 2017, India, with 241 million users, edged past the US, with 240 million, to become the country with the highest number of Facebook users.
The tech behemoth has come under a cloud after the Cambridge Analytic (CA) scandal surfaced recently, with charges of 87 million Facebook users’ personal data having been shared, without their knowledge and permission, with the British political and business consultancy that worked with the Trump campaign. Almost 80 per cent of users were from the US, and half a million in India. Facebook users sign up for free, but the 2004 start-up mines their data to target ads and campaigns, selling sensitive information to advertisers…Click here to read full article.
