#Deletefacebook

Facebook- one of the earliest social platforms that helps people to connect to each other.
In today’s time, who is not on Facebook? From children to aged people, everyone has an account on Facebook and people share everything on it. Facebook knows your name, gender, address, interests, has access to your profile photo and it literally has every detail of yours and what you do in your life. Facebook even has your data as the user of other applications when they areconnected through Facebook. This enables Facebook to have all your details and thus, know everything about your likes and dislikes.

The article focuses on the particular scandal of ‘Facebook Data Breach’ that came out to the world in which the data of around fifty million people was leaked so as to manipulate people’s opinion and help in getting votes. Facebook does have our personal information but it is their duty to secure it but a company called Cambridge Analytica accessed the personal data of the users in order to manipulate the votes and this made Donald Trump the President of U.S. The company, using the data of the users, started showing them only those posts and ads that the individual liked, this diverted people’s mind towards Trump and he, thus, won the election. The company got the data using an app, which was released few years back, called ‘This is my Digital Life’ by Aleksandr Kogan in which data was extracted from personality tests given by its users and this information was passed to Cambridge Analytica.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, apologised for the same and said that if they cannot respect the privacy of their users then this platform of one billion users is worthless. Thus, for this matter, Facebook needs to take a step in order to secure the privacy. For the same reason, people started the #DeleteFacebook Campaign where they started deactivating their profiles and uninstalling the Facebook application so as not to share any more of their data. Through this whole scandal, people need to work on their analytic mind rather than believing every post and ad, think before doing anything and think twice before doing something as crucial as voting.

In the recent times, the movement again gained momentum when an edited video of speaker of the United States House of Representatives was made viral on Facebook and that lead to people believing that she was drunk and was slurring her words in the same video.

These things raised serious questions about whether to be on such sites or to delete them. Privacy is a major concern for every individual and the spread of several fake news, images and videos has been there for many years. That is why it is questioned whether to consider such social sites boon as it connects people across the world or bane as it disregards people's sentiments and plays with the reality.