More often than not, similar to many teenagers in the 21st century, I used a common and rising trend to reach news – through social media. More specifically Facebook. Found and owned by Mark Zuckerberg, a 27-year-old who is one of the richest men in the world. Facebook has become such an integral part of today’s society, extremely common and the majority of people have an account in some way or another. It’s a website where people can post updates and status posts on their ‘wall’. Anyone is able to use it and share pretty much anything that they wish – this including businesses and groups. This is including news sources, regularly they are advertised based on ‘your preferences’ and this subconsciously influences you to be thinking about the news topics raised.
Mark Zuckerberg was recently called in front of American Congress to represent his company because Facebook was found to be collecting and keeping information about its users, and connecting it to a third party called “Cambridge Analytica”, a political analysis firm. Cambridge Analytica was noticed to be connected to President Trumps election campaign during 2016, and it was found that the data of individuals given was taken to build a psychological voter profiles prior to the election and influence the news sources and ‘ads’ that popped up on their Facebook feed. This information was not made aware to the users of Facebook, sparking controversy and outrage.
So does this matter?
Of course, this controversy and outrage from the public was something that demanded to be attended to. The privacy and trust that individuals had with their social media account had been broken, and without their knowledge. Zuckerberg was demanded to testify in front of Congress and the hashtag ‘#DeleteFacebook’ rapidly became a global trend.
This breach of privacy from a social media company is highly significant because for those that were using Facebook, have lost this intimacy they may have been feeling with the social networking site, and many people have withdrawn from the site in worry of their personal information being at risk. Modern day society being fed misleading news is on the up-rise with this genre of ‘fake-news’. This fake news creates a negative stigma around the media genre and the mistrust from the public can result in the question, can we trust anything?
Whilst technically a company issue, this comes back to those that own the company, and most specifically in this case, who initially found it and has regular say, Mark Zuckerberg. Individuals must question who is really running the news sources they listen too. A mistake on this scale is massive for a rising modern day outlet for individuals to keep up to date and access news sources via other than newspaper sources. Using users information to make tailor made ads and news that pops up is something extremely distrusting and personally, gives myself very limited trust in the news sources in which I access via platforms such as Facebook due to these kinds of issues.
So how about you? What trust do you have in these news sources? Did the Cambridge Analytica circumstance change your perspective on having Facebook? Let me know.
Till next time,
Alex
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References –
Featured Image – Free to use
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_-_South_by_Southwest_2008.jpg
http://whoownsfacebook.com/ – Website used to gather information of blog post
http://fortune.com/2018/04/06/facebook-scandals-mark-zuckerberg/ – Website that was used to gather information regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal
AMC Blogs 
Great blog post Alex! it was a very factual and well structured post. the Cambridge Analytica circumstance you talked about disturbed me and I definitely agree… these issues gives me very limited trust in the news sources I use to access the sites I use to receive my news too and it is highly frightening that these issues are becoming more and more common too. I loved how you ended the post in a question, asking the audience what we thought… it really furthered my understanding of the topic as it forced me to sit and think of my opinion on the topic. I think you could work on incorporating more of your opinion, I wanted to your thoughts on a lot of what you said rather than to general opinions. Other than that I couldn’t fault it!
great job Alex
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Great blog post Alex, to answer your question, What trust do you have in these news sources? I myself have a fairly big trust in the news sources i found through facebook due to the fact that it gives me the option to choose the news sources i actually want to see. But then again when you say “Using users information to make tailor made ads and news that pops up is something extremely distrusting and personally” makes me question my trust that I have in Facebook as a News source.
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