The Cambridge Analytica affair reveals Facebook’s “Transparency Paradox” - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610577/the-cambridge-analytica-affair-reveals-facebooks-transparency-para
One really important question is whether all this could harm researchers’ efforts to shed more light on the immense influence that social networks now have over our lives. To explore the issue, we spoke with Sinan Aral, a social-media expert who is a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Were you surprised that a researcher could access so much data and allegedly pass it to a third party in violation of Facebook’s data use rules?
I wasn’t surprised they could access that much data. Facebook’s been pursuing research questions with qualified researchers for some time. What is surprising is that an academic researcher could so flagrantly violate the spirit and the terms of the data-sharing policies Facebook has in place by taking that data and giving it to a firm that was never authorized to have it in the first place for the purposes of political targeting.
Are you very concerned that this episode could have a chilling effect on social networks’ willingness to share data with researchers?
Yes, I am. Facebook is facing what I call a “transparency paradox.” On the one hand, it’s under tremendous pressure to be more transparent, to reveal more about how targeted advertising works; how its News Feed algorithms work; how its trending algorithms work; and how Russia or anyone else can spread propaganda and false news on the network. So there’s this very strong pressure to be more transparent and to share data with trusted third parties. But on the other hand, there’s really strong pressure to increase the security of the data that they do reveal to make sure that it doesn’t get into the wrong hands and to protect users’ privacy.
This transparency paradox is at the core of Facebook’s existential crisis today, and there’s a real risk that the Cambridge Analytica story will make it more conservative in what it shares, which would affect the research of hundreds of good scientists who are working with the social network every day without breaching its terms of service in order to understand how Facebook is affecting our society.
I think the story is about a researcher who flagrantly violated the likely terms of any data-sharing agreement he had with Facebook for research purposes and the company, Cambridge Analytica, that either knowingly or unknowingly used the data for potentially nefarious purposes without vetting the source of that data and any restrictions associated with it. That’s the real story here.
We need to better understand the threat of bad actors who may use access to data to help them spread fake news or propaganda on social platforms. And the only way we’re going to get a handle on that is if Facebook can find a way to resolve its transparency paradox effectively by becoming more open and more secure at the same time.