The c. E. O. Of facebook is under enormous pressure as he makes his way to a congressional hearing called by u. S. Lawmakers. Facebook has been harshly criticized since news broke of the enormous abuse of its data by cambridge analytical. Senators have been questioning Mark Zuckerberg about his companys carefree attitude toward its customers data and possible manipulation of the u. S. Electoral system through the use of such data. Zuckerberg performance was contrite and apologetic we didnt take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake and it was my mistake and im sorry i started facebook i run it and im responsible for what happens here. Although zuckerberg came across as well prepared and willing to accept criticism he wasnt making any promises its not enough to just give people a voice we need to make sure that people arent using it to harm other people or to spread misinformation and its not enough to just give people control over their information we need to make sure that the developers they share it with protect their information to. This is the story of how one of the worlds biggest and most powerful private corporations is using our lives and our data to turn vast profits. The most Successful Company arguably and Human History at just gathering peoples time and turning that time into money. Today facebook is by far the biggest social Media Network in the world and in effect enjoys a global monopoly so far only a minority of its users seem worried about the influence it has on our lives. Facebook has very cleverly figured out how to wrap itself around our lives its a family photo album its your message to your friends its your daily diary its your contact list its all of these things wrapped around your life. Like his company facebooks founder hardly needs introducing Mark Zuckerberg started the social media platform in two thousand and four when he was just nineteen as a site for harvard undergraduate students. First for you know maybe four hundred five hundred people Harvard Facebook so thats the gap that were filling our one hundred thousand people so. Within its first month more than half the students a joint setting the trend for the membership explosion that follows. Now almost. The quarter of the worlds population has signed on. Its bigger than any country. Facebook is a global colossus. Its one of the worlds most valuable corporation worth over four hundred billion dollars. Mark zuckerberg is an International Power broker in his own right. Hes like a king right hes like a monarch hes making decisions about your life on facebook what the rules are and hes a benevolent dictator. You cant say that this is accountable governance or participatory governance. In any particular way. But almost two billion users still isnt enough for facebook. Mark zuckerberg is aiming for the next billion. Theres a limit to how much they can grow in established markets like north america and australia but the thirty three year old businessman sees huge potential in the developing world. Theres a term thats being used by folks connected to facebook and google called the last billion where theyre basically trying to figure out a way to spread Internet Access but the internet that theyre going to spread is an internet thats shaped by facebook and facebooks agendas thats actually part of the long game here and most people in a lot of the developing world. Are accessing the internet through their mobile phones and there are these programs that are known as zero rating or facebook zero so that when when you when you get your smart phone you can use you get free data if youre using facebook and some people stay on facebook they dont go anywhere else. And so that their whole world on the internet becomes very much. The same as as they dont know any other kind of internet. Facebook is a free service but thats because zuckerberg has learned how to turn our data into dollars lots of dollars. In two thousand and sixteen his Company Earns twenty seven and a half billion u. S. Dollars just under sixteen dollars for each user. And hes buying even more internet real estate. For your fish because all that community fred its all about what people around the world are coming together to do next year with friends and family forming this unity. Facebook presents itself as a digital platform a neutral stage upon which my plays out. Shes sixty we all are through to get. This we need it says its a company that develops Digital Technology not social engineering. For all the talk about Community Facebook is neither democratic nor transparent its closer to home. Any place we go to that is not truly open thats not governed by us as users thats not governed by a sort of some democratic accountability is actually a place that is is not truly ours its a place that we can use it provides great value in many ways dont dont get me wrong to its users but its incorrect to see it as a neutral place it can do things. Like a government and indeed it is sort of inherited. Some government like functions but i dont think that passes the smell test to imagine that facebook or any Online Platform is truly democratic or not. To understand how facebook works we need to understand what goes on under the hood the engine that drives the system is built on algorithms sets of instructions that facebooks engineers use to determine what we see in our news. Dr select drive as an Information Systems expert explains how a basic algorithm works typically rhythm might be for processing or doing some arithmetic summing something for example or it might be to try and recreate the Decision Making process that we use in our human brain on a more sophisticated level. Facebooks algorithms were originally configured to help Harvard University students stay in touch with one another they exploited the way the students had a small group of Close Friends and the wider looser social circles. The algorithms are now bashfully more complex but exactly how they work is a closely guarded commercial secret. We do know that theyre designed with one aim in mind to keep us online for as long as possible. The algorithms are designed to be helpful and give us information thats relevant to us but dont for a minute assume that the algorithms are just there to help us the algorithms are there to make a profit for facebook. And that is facebooks genius its a giant agency that uses its platform so the liver us advertising. By tracking what we do who we associate with what websites we look at facebook is able to. Makes sophisticated judgments about the stories we see. But also advertising. Facebooks very well aware of you know our sentiment to talk to people and i can put all that data together and start to understand who our exes are and who our friends are who are old friends are who are new friends are and thats how it really works to devise another post inside of here at the top here Adam Helfgott runs a Digital Marketing company in new york. He uses a tool called facebook picks this time. With that they can track anybody who visits their site and target them with ads on facebook. Well if youve ever log into facebook with you or with any of your browsers its a good chance theyll not know that youre not to be logged in you have to have been there at some point in time and if its a brand new computer and you never logged in the facebook. Facebook at that moment in time wont know its you but based upon you know their algorithms and your usage theyll figure it out so what you can do is put this piece of script in your website and then use facebook. To find the people that looked at your website and then talk to them through facebook. That feels a little bit creepy i mean it is is that a privacy issues and. I mean from a legal point of view theres no privacy issues thats just you know the internet and the state of it and using a product that generates a lot of revenue for facebook. For advertisers its a boon giving them access to the most intimate details of our lives. Making brownlow is a media strategist for Pricewaterhouse Coopers in sydney. When you change your status for example we might see something a young woman has her status to engaged suddenly she gets ads for Bridal Services they sorts of things are clues about what her interests not really they are the research from consumers is i dont like have a ton if its not relevant to them if it actually is something that they want that dont mind it so much so this is actually not a bad thing. As a former hacker turned Security Consultant hes been using his skills to investigate the way our data is track. One day who really pick made a discovery that startled the tech world he found that even if youre not logged on to facebook even if youre not a member the company tracks and stores a huge amount of your browsing history and you cant opt out. If you dont like facebook if you dont like the kind of things youre describing just close your account. Its very difficult to opt out of facebooks reach on the web even if you close your account even if you log out avoid the services the way that theyre set up with their sharing buttons and so forth theyre still going to build a profile for you and says not going to have the same level of information associated with it they dont even tell us clearly what theyre doing. They tell us some things but its its not specific enough to really answer the question if somebody was going to build a dossier on me based on what facebook knows about me what would it look like i should be able to know that. So that i can make informed decisions about how hes the platform. Facebook isnt just influencing what we buy its changing the world we live to. Serve they want to kind of bring their service to everybody on the planet from a commercial standpoint thats obviously a goal. Whether it makes the world a better place is another question so facebook provides this. It provides a place that is almost ideal for finding like minded people whether that means finding people who live in a certain place who are interested in a certain thing or people who are in the thrall of a dangerous ideology and. Facebook has been criticized for the way it censors controversial posts. Whenever someone flags opposed as offensive it gets sent to a human moderator who decides if it should be taken down. The company says it reviews a hundred million pieces of content every month. You cant have a common standard for one point eight billion people our diversity is actually our strength right part of what makes us a Global Community is the reality that what forms a Global Community are incredibly fundamental difference. In one infamous example facebook removed the post showing one of the most powerful images of the vietnam war the photograph of a naked girl playing a naipaul attack violated this Community Standards. The candy standards are developed by his staff. The community didnt develop those standards. And theyre called Community Standards. That they were developed by facebook and yes then theyve had input here and there over time they also get input from governments about you know recently a number of governments told them you need to amend your Community Standards to be harder on extremist content now and so they amended their Community Standards this not like the community to act together develop these standards. At the heart of political power is information thats why Government Security agencies go to extraordinary lengths to vacuum up data but increasingly its also becoming the key to winning power. I think that theres you know. A legitimate argument to this that facebook influenced the election at the United StatesElection Results i think that facebook and algorithms are partially responsible if not you know the main reason why there is this shift towards hyper partisan Belief Systems these days. When donald trump became the front runner in the last u. S. President ial election you pundits predicted that hed actually win one of the Trump Campaign secret weapons was an ability to Research Social media data an extraordinary detail that helped him understand and target his voters with the precision weve never seen before. By using facebooks ad targeting engine for example they know if some of those independent voters have actually liked republican pages or like the Bernie Sanders page or like a donald trump page so you can go to them to spend money to target advertising specifically to those voters and it is a much more reliable ultimately form of targeting than many of the other online. Vehicles out there. Political strategist Patrick Ruffini runs a company that mines big data for the republican party. He produces social media maps that help them make sure their political messages hit their targets what it does give us is a much greater level of certainty and granularity and precision and down to the individual voter down to the individual precinct about how things are going to go it used to be we could survey eight hundred thousand registered voters nationwide but you couldnt really make projections about understanding from that to understanding how an individual state would go or how an individual voter would ultimately go i gotta try and do solemnly swear that i will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States i. Its one thing to know your voters of course and quite another to manipulate them to change their minds thank you baseball can help with that too was the ability to take the pools and big data that weve got and do really deep analysis of it to understand small groups of customers preferences can be applied in a political setting in a way that is potentially worrying because it allows politicians to potentially live better for instance you cant make a political stand on Television Without it being disclosed who is being paid for the same controls on the web a very lax for instance i could say a story about a certain exquisite politician has done a great thing produced on a completely different third party and you saw it and i cannot know that that ad was placed by a political operation who have specifically targeted may because that information is not disclosed in the way i am understanding it troubled by the by the by the data driven advertising and targeting ads that occur but im even more. Uncomfortable by the reality that our elections and how our elections are structured and configured can be hijacked by the forces that are not transparent to us. One of the most important parts of any democracy is news almost half of all americans get theirs from facebook. The last us election also saw the explosion in fake news turbocharged by sharing on facebook. These things look like news they function like news theyre shared like news they dont match up with traditional ideas of what news is for and what it should do. Facebook is in the middle of this they are the they are the company that can see all of this and make judgments about it. I think they would prefer not to have to do that Adam Schrader is a journalist who used to edit stories for facebooks trending news section part of his job was to filter out fake news. We operated like a newsroom it was structured like a news room copy editors had you know would make sure that the topics met standards make sure that they were unbiased checked facts there were often times a fake articles would appear and present themselves as possibly being a legitimate trending topic and our job was you know identifying those and the original terms blacklisting. In the heat of the campaign right wing commentators accuse the team of bias facebook sacked the team and handed the job to an algorithm an algorithm cannot do the job of a trained journalist they dont have the ability to reason Artificial Intelligence hasnt gotten to the point where it can you know really function like a human brain and determine what has news value and what is good for the public and what what is not. Shrader says after the team was sacked fake news really took off yeah after the scene was like there was a big problem with. Sensational or factually incorrect or misleading news sources and trending topics it was just a disaster the more partisan news sources you consume the less likely you are to believe Fact Checkers or experts and so this can create some really dangerous division believers of alternative facts. One study found that in the closing months of the us election facebook users shared the top twenty fake news stories over a million times more than the top twenty stories from major news outlets. Fake stories are often written either for political advantage or to make money there are a lot of people out there who arent journalists and are publishers who are publishing they dont have that same sense of obligation so we are really in uncharted territory i think one of the most important things is that we actually need a big public debate about this because its changed the nature of news and in doing so its changed our reality as a society. If you suspect a news story is fake you can report it. It just takes a few taps zuckerberg initially dismissed the notion that fake news skewed the election but hes now asking facebook users to flag suspect stories Mark Zuckerberg has said that you know hes not in the news publication business or theyre not a Media Company but i think thats a mistake a kind of a denial so theyre definitely a Media Company i