What corporate social responsibilities social media company

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Reference no: EM132652276

The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal:

We are psychographically-targeted by social media using data we willingly supplied to them.

In 2018, the Facebook - Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that data from around 87 million Facebook users was harvested without the users' knowledge. That data was used to target political campaign advertising. This strategy is also called psychographic micro- targeting. Micro-targeting on social media platforms enables marketers, commercial or political, to identify and exploit individual biases and vulnerabilities in real time. The extent to which Cambridge Analytica helped Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign is unclear. However, it is evident that both Cambridge Analytica and Donald Trump's campaign team praised the role data analytics played in Donald Trump's victory.

"Once President Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee (R.N.C.) on data analytics,"... "Leading into the election, the R.N.C. had invested in the most sophisticated data-targeting program in modern American history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. We were proud to have worked with the R.N.C. and its data experts and relied on them as our main source for data analytics."

Alexander Nix (Former CEO of Cambridge Analytica)

Cambridge Analytica had gone bankrupt in 2018, following the revelation of its scandalous practice. Facebook has been sued by various regulators for its involvement in the scandal. The UK Information Commission Office fined the company £500,000 in 2018. It was ordered to pay a $5 billion fine by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigation. In March 2020, Australia's information commission sued Facebook for breaching the privacy of over 300,000 Australians.9
The scandal has sparked debates about tech companies' ever evolving social responsibilities. There is no doubt that companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter should take greater responsibility in protecting their users' digital privacy. However, their current advertising practices are unlikely to be changed.10 Even if the data is safe, users are still exposed to various cyber-risks such as misinformation, scams, cyberbullying etc... Underlying the obvious digital privacy issue, there is also a demand for tech companies to do more to improve users' digital trust.
Not everyone agrees that it is the organisation's responsibility to police social platforms to determine what is factually correct and incorrect, or what is socially acceptable and what is not. Take 'fake news' for example. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has repeatedly expressed his view on 'fake news': the company will not fact-check political advertisements

Question 1: Many people believe they are 'immune' to psychographically tailored political and commercial advertisements on social media. They believe only 'weak' minds would be manipulated. Conduct research, and provide a strong argument on why relying on individuals' resilience on online manipulation is problematic.

Question 2: What corporate social responsibilities do social media companies have in relation to the use of psychographic profiling in advertising?

Reference no: EM132652276

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