The ethics of social media platforms

The time is now long overdue for a judicial inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the social media and their effect on society, writes Raymond Snoddy

So many hares have been set running, so many headlines generated amid claim and counter claim, by the burgeoning Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal that it is difficult to know where it will end up.

All you can say for certain is that it is very serious and will have serious consequences for all involved.

It has been a social scandal that has taken a long time to come to the boil, the unholy mixture of fake news, phoney data, addicted young people, stirred by “the likes” of a quarter of the world’s population.

It has, of course, been a truism that Facebook has become one of the largest corporations on earth by assembling personal information and selling it on to advertisers.

Advertisers have loved it because it appears to be both targetted and effective.

There have always been questions about what has been going on behind the curtain – the extent to which users were actually giving informed consent about how their information was being used and commercialised.

The quiet, tacit consensus has been blown apart with the news, brought to us by the New York Times and The Observer, ably assisted by Channel 4 News, that Cambridge Analytica had managed to get access to Facebook data on 50 million American voters.

That is bad enough but it is the use that the information was put to – political targeting on behalf of the Trump presidential candidacy – that makes the matter truly toxic.

Extrapolations from a fairly basic online personality test allowing those campaigning for Trump to pump out crude anti-Clinton propaganda to potentially susceptible eyeballs could actually have swung the election.

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The effect would not have had to be very great, less than 100,000 out of total votes cast of 120 million in three key states was enough to swing it.

We know from The Times that this was not the only triumph of Cambridge Analytica but that the company has been involved in elections in Africa and the Caribbean, with or without attractive Ukrainian women, and questions are also being asked in Australia and India.

It also supported the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum. Some further interrogation of referendum data may be required in the UK in that context.

Naturally the company denies any wrongdoing.

The suspension of CA’s chief executive Alexander Nix does not even begin to address the problem, and it certainly raises questions about the company’s future.

Whether it’s Bell Pottinger or the Weinstein Company, there is no future for an organisation when confidence has been damaged and clients simply melt away with only the most dodgy willing to continue doing business with you.

Many will hope that enough data will have survived inside Cambridge Analytica for Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham to reveal the full information trail.

Whether CA survives or not is in the end unimportant except for those whose jobs will be at stake.

The big issue is of course Facebook, which equally naturally denies any misdeeds, and how this scandal will affect its future, apart from the $50 billion already wiped off its share price.

Damian Collins MP, who chairs the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, has girded his loins like a latter-day Don Quixote and demanded that Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg come to London to answer questions before his committee.

Unlikely Damian, but it’s always worth asking.

Collins is on far more realistic ground when he calls on Culture Secretary Matt Hancock to seek stronger power for the Information Commissioner to be able to get more rapid access to suspect data before the delete button gets red hot.

The Federal Trade Commission in the US, with rather more relevant powers, may have more luck in getting the gone-missing Zuckerberg to appear.

And then there is Congress. As Senator Dianne Feinstein put it, she wants Zuckerberg to come and explain himself, not Facebook’s lawyer or its number two. Mark Zuckerberg.

Overall it’s been a bad few days for the social media.

CA and Facebook may have taken centre stage but the war of Jeremy Corbyn’s Leninist hat was revealing in its own way.

A pundit on Newsnight accused the BBC programme of manipulating an image of Corbyn in his cold weather hat to make it look more “Leninist”, a terrible political smearing by image.

An accusatory tweet reached 2 million while a BBC denial – a denial backed up by Channel 4 fact-checkers – reached only 2,400.

A Twitter retweet is in effect the equivalent of a Facebook “like” and Corbyn’s hat is a small but eloquent illustration of the social media’s role in what has become the endless cycle of reinforcing prejudices.

The political backlash has already begun – but it will only be effective if action is international and co-ordinated.

There have already been final, final warnings from the EU to the social media on the taking down of hate speech but so far the approach has tended to be fragmentary and incomplete.

The scandal of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, the data rights of the 50 million and the manipulation of a US Presidential election may be the stimulus for a more comprehensive inquiry.

You may recall that the Government set up a judicial press inquiry following the phone-hacking activities of a number of popular newspapers.

The Leveson Inquiry was set up to look at “the culture, practices and ethics of the press.”

In its more than 2,000 pages Lord Justice Leveson managed only one page or so on the internet, yet the issues thrown up by the social media are every bit as serious, albeit it in a different way, as anything examined by the Leveson inquiry.

The time is now long overdue for a judicial inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the social media and their effect on society, politics and the established media.

Such an inquiry could be held in the UK alone and have considerable impact but if there was any way to make it an international tribunal that would be so much better, despite the obvious difficulties of organising such a thing.

Meanwhile many will greatly regret the fact that they have always ignored the siren songs of Facebook and never signed up.

This means they will be denied the satisfaction and pleasure of acting on the #DeleteFacebook campaign.