Explain - The Facebook Scandal

Hello and welcome to Explain, where i explain different topics. Today, we will be talking about the Facebook Scandal of 2018.

The Facebook Scandal.

Now if you have been living under a heavy rock for years or live on Mars, Facebook is a social networking site that was founded in 2004 and was ment to be only used by Cambridge University students.

On September 26 2006, Facebook was opened to everybody who was 13 and had a valid email address. Soon, Facebook grew and grew and currently in 2018, 2 out of 7 people use Facebook every month (according to Facebook Newsroom) and has over $84 billion in assets.

In March 2018, news outlets started to report on a scandal about a company called Cambridge Analytica and that they were using data from 87 million Facebook users to attempt to influence the political views and opinions of users to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election.

During a testimony to Congress, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that in 2013, Aleksandr Kogan (a researcher from Cambridge University) created a personality quiz app that was downloaded by 300,000 people and was used to retrieve information on Facebook, including friends and family of the people who participated. It wasn't until 2015 that Zuckerberg realised that the information of these users were being shared from Kogan to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook asked Analytica to delete the data until multiple news outlets like The Guardian, The New York Times and others learnt that in fact they wern't deleted.

After the news broke, Facebook shares dropped, Mark Zuckerberg spoke to Congress and rumours of him being a robot/lizard were being thrown around on the internet and on the 18th of May 2018, Cambridge Analytica filed for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy.

In short, Facebook had a data breach. This story is still going on but here this explanation has to. This has been explain and thank you for reading.

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