Facebook Gives Details On Vote Meddling, But Is The Shift Real One?

Facebook, a company hellbent to make the whole world more and more open, has been very secretive about the details pertaining to how it runs its social network, especially how things go wrong and what steps does it takes to stop them.

As on Tuesday, Facebook hurriedly rushed towards alerting the Congress and the public that most recently it was able to detect a very small but “sophisticated” case of possible Russian election manipulation. Does that mean that the social networking site had acknowledged the urgent need to keep the world always informed about the big problems its going under with, rather than doing any kind of that communication only when dragged kicking and screaming to the podium?

While the sudden and unprompted revelation does goes on to signal a new, albeit tightly controlled clarity for the company, but there is still plenty of things Facebook is not stating. According to many experts, the details put by the company is still unconvincing about the seemingly cultural change and not mere window dressing.

“This is all calculated very carefully,” said Timothy Carone, who is a business professor at the University of Notre Dame. He and many other analysts noted that Facebook announced its discovery of a total of 32 accounts and pages intended to stir up US political discord just a week after the Facebook’s stock dropped almost 20 percent — its worst plunge since going public.

But Facebook’s recent proactive disclosure, which includes a conference call for reporters with chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, struck a markedly different type of tone from the company’s ham-handed approach to a string of scandals and series of setbacks over the past two years. That has included:

— CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous dismissal of the idea that fake news on social media giant Facebook could have influenced the 2016 election as “a pretty crazy idea”;

— The company’s foot-dragging as evidence mounted of a 2016 Russian election-interference effort conducted on the social media giant Facebook and other social-media sites;

— Zuckerberg, again, declining for nearly a week to publicly address the privacy issue over a Trump campaign consultant, Cambridge Analytica, that scavenged privacy data from tens of millions of Facebook users for its own election-influence efforts.

In most recent steps, a chastened Facebook, worked toward transparency, many of them seems easy to overlook. It was the first time in April that it published detailed guidelines about its moderators use to police unacceptable material. For that it provided additional, partial, explanations of how it collects user data and what it does with it. It has all but forced disclosure of the funding and audience specifically targeting of political advertisements, which it as of now also archives for public scrutiny.

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