Not a week without at least one piece of news that denies the Facebook imageIt almost seems like it has become a tradition. It is understandable that those responsible are considering a name change, since the current one has such a deteriorated record that, personally, I doubt that there are humans left on the face of the Earth who know of at least one of the problems that, throughout over the years, the company has experienced.
Sometimes problems have been due to technical failures, which have allowed access to information that, in theory, should be kept protected by the company. Thus, for example, it was how it was conceived the Cambridge Analytica scandal by which, by the way, Mark Zuckerberg was indicted yesterday in a personal capacity after years of attempts to avoid it by Facebook’s lawyers.
Other problems, however, are even more questionable. And it is that the technical clumsiness when you should guard the data of your users like gold in cloth is already something quite criticizable, but it is much more so to know that your service is being used incorrectly and choose to look the other way, thinking about the economic benefits that such laxity can bring you. If so, and unlike technical failures, this type of abandonment of functions is not justified or deserves forgiveness.
And this is what we can read in Engadget, where it is reported that A former Facebook employee has denounced the social network company for ignoring warnings on the alleged interference attempts, originating in Russia, in the 2016 US presidential elections. A complaint that gains considerable weight if we take into account that the whistleblower was part of the Facebook integrity team, that is, of those responsible for preventing hoaxes and false news on the social network.
It is not the first complaint of this type that Facebook has experienced lately. Actually, just a few weeks ago another former employee, Frances Haugen, already made a high-profile complaint in the same vein. There is also the remarkable circumstance that Haugen was also part of the team to ensure the integrity and reliability of the information. posted on the net. That in less than a month two former members of that team have denounced similar events, surely it will have generated a lot of concern in the Facebook offices.
In this new complaint, the former employee states that had a conversation with a Facebook executive, in which he informed him of the attempts at Russian interference in the 2016 elections. In response, the executive replied that the scandal would be a flash of lightning, and that «we’re printing money in the basement and we’re fine«. If this is true, it would demonstrate that all the measures announced by the company, including the creation of the group designed precisely to ensure that these things do not happen, would be nothing more than a pantomime to try to wash its image after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. A suspicion that, being frank, has been flying over the Facebook image for a long time.
