Image: PA Images. All rights reserved.
The Cambridge Analytica revelations this weekend wreck the credibility of Alexander Nix’s company and of Facebook. Cambridge Analytica will probably close down. Facebook will struggle to rebuild trust in its ability to carry political communication. As a user, it’s a reminder you really have no idea who’s behind a message or how it found its way to you. It’s not hard to see the company now deciding that politics isn’t worth the trouble it’s giving them (due to the trouble they’ve given it).
Because Facebook can’t be trusted, the company, platforms like it and the wider universe of those who sell data and technology solutions to campaigns, should have their role in political communication regulated. These revelations, among other things, prove they can’t oversee themselves. Facebook itself probably knows this by now.
