The team at Facebook is not having a great week, as it seems all of its recent data scandal chickens have come home to roost. Last Wednesday, July 25, its market cap took a US$120 billion beating in the aftermath of earnings that fell short of revenue and earnings targets. Analysts say this is the first indication that the animus over the Cambridge Analytica issue could have a longer-term impact on three dimensions of its platform: advertisers, users, and the cost to run the platform.
Two days later, Facebook and its executive team found themselves named in a class-action lawsuit—actually, several of them—alleging that the social network made false and misleading statements related to the decline of monthly active users prior to the second-quarter earnings report.
Over the weekend, Last Week Tonight served up its own version of an “honest Facebook” ad—in a parody of the apology ad they offered up a few weeks ago—that was pretty brutal and immediately went viral.
And then on Tuesday, July 31, three-and-a-half months after Mark Zuckerberg spent about 10 hours testifying in front of senators and congress people to apologize for the Cambridge Analytica incident (and explaining the internet to our elected representatives), the other shoe dropped when it came to the long-speculated subject of the federal government regulating big tech.
Virginia Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released a policy paper detailing 20 options for the g
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