TOBY SHAPSHAK: Facebook’s bad-to-worse month
Millions of unencrypted passwords and the live streaming of the Christchurch massacre show its problems aren’t going away
The good news is Facebook has shut down white supremacists and hate speech. The bad news is that it happened only after the live streaming of the horror Christchurch massacre in March. Worse is that Facebook’s lax policies around data privacy were confirmed when it was revealed that hundreds of millions of its users’ passwords were stored in an unencrypted plain text format. It didn’t help that both happened around the one-year anniversary of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It was a bad few weeks for under-fire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose own pronouncements on privacy being eroded — he called it an evolving "social norm" without any irony — seem to have set the tone at his company. The world’s largest social network, with 2.2-billion users, is facing an unprecedented onslaught from angry users, US district attorneys and activists about its many scandals. But Facebook controversies are so frequent we’ve become inured to them. This is ironic, given how social media thrives on...
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