Facebook has had a rough year since it was found that the platform could have been used to sway the presidential elections in 2016. Mark Zuckerberg appeared before congress in an attempt to clear the company’s image and answer questions about the privacy concerns that were surrounding it. The hearing lasted for what felt like an eternity and by the end of it, the company’s future was shrouded in mystery.
Since last year, Facebook’s stocks have taken a massive hit as customers feel like their privacy is being endangered. The shares, which were somehow barely managing to crawl their way up, saw a boom on Friday as they went up by 0.72% at $219.88 at mid-day, which is the highest they have ever been. By the time the day ended, the shared dropped down 0.11%, which is still the highest they’ve been since July 25, 2018.
Seeing how the company is finally gaining some traction after the horrendous beating it took last year, one would think that it would try to stay as far away from the upcoming elections in 2020. But that’s where Mark Zuckerberg’s mind differentiates from the average person’s. Facebook has declared that it would still take money for political ads and that while it will attempt to cut down on false information being fed leading up to election season, it still lets it pass deeming it to be ‘Right to Speech'(the golden words for when you don’t want to be held accountable).
Infact, instead of checking data for correctness, or I don’t know, not getting into this mess and serving microads based on each individual person (they can do that, Facebook likes to store user data), the company has decided to bring about cosmetic changes to the ads, which wouldn’t even come with the default settings and have to be selected from a hoard of menus.
It’s not clear how the company is trying to segue to ‘We will definitely take money for ads’ from ‘We are sorry for our platform’s ads being used to kill democracy’, but here we are.
