Facebook is Failing

With 67% of African Americans being Facebook users, its hard to believe how many times Facebook has messed up for the Black community. It seems that Facebook has turned a blind eye to many things that occur on this means of media.  To start, they have a laissez-faire attitude towards their privacy protection as they have a lack of vigilance to protect one of their most vulnerable user demographics. An example of how this is true is when Facebook let Russian sponsored ads that portrayed African Americans badly. These ads displayed Black Lives Matter activists as murders, attempting to be a political motive, swaying voters toward one candidate, who was then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. In addition to these ads, Cambridge Analytica worked with the presidential campaign and found that pictures, profiles, and even direct messages were misused, leading to voter manipulation. Not only has this occurred, but recently, news just came out that the largest Black Lives Matter group on Facebook was a fraudulent page as it was created by a white male in Australia and his goal was to discredit the youth-based civil rights group. This is enough to seriously question the integrity of Facebook as they lack transparency, reliability, and accountability. Facebook has made strides in the correct direction with attempting to remove hate speech, but devoting more resources to this effort would help remove more of this problem. In addition, the company is almost all white. This was an issue that was brought to CEO Zuckerberg on his 2nd day of his hearing as his Rep mentioned that the company’s Black representation has only risen from 2 percent to 3 percent. Clearly, Facebook has a lot of things that it needs to tweak in order to fix its problems with failing the Black community.

Leave a Reply