AD&PRLAB: Facebook Crisis-Cambridge Analytica
This article is about the Facebook Crisis that we had to analyze for the Crisis Management class of AD & PR Lab.
For this Christmas break, we were assigned by Ms. Mania Xenou and Ms. Betty Tsakarestou to work on our second project (you can read about the first one here and about the final assignment here), the analysis of the Facebook Crisis.
The story started some years ago but the outburst of the crisis happened in March 2018, after the media reported details about how Cambridge Analytica accessed the information of millions of American citizens illegally and without any notice. Immediately, social media all over the world reacted with the #DeleteFacebook hashtag campaign and Facebook hired Stroz Friedberg to audit Cambridge Analytica.
In the meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and leader, had to testify before Congress and to apologize, belated, with posts on his profile.
On March 20th, the U.K. Government sent a letter to Zuckerberg pressing him to testify, while Facebook’s market value dropped by almost $50 billion, representing the stock’s largest two-day loss.
Some days later, another medium reported that Facebook “surreptitiously” collected call and SMS data for years from Android users, including names, phone numbers and the length of calls.
After all these and in order to protect personal data, the EU puts into effect the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 25th, a rule that made Facebook issue new privacy policies to its users and make some significant changes to its operations.
Half a year later, Facebook got attecked from hackers that took avantage of a damage of the code system and collected personal data of million users from the “View As” service. This time, Facebook’s reaction was immediate, the damage was restored and this certain service was abolished.
Our team (C1): Amanda Voulgari, Vickie Gatsiou, Angela Douka, Daphne Diapouli, Aristea Papadopoulou, Mpleona Tzaka, Iliana Chalimourda, Ioanna Chatzimanolaki.
Special thanks to all the teams that participated, our instructor Mania Xenou and our professor and Head of Advertising & PR Lab Betty Tsakarestou. Thank you for this amazing experience!
