Direction (Qs.1 to 10): Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below them. Certain words are given in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.

The entire model of most social media sites – especially Facebook – is inherently flawed. People and business produce, as well as consume, the content on these sites. These sites decide who sees what content algorithmically through artificial intelligence (AI)-driven code. For instance if you start clicking ‘Like’ on posts that are right-leaning, the newer posts you see on your Facebook page will continue to become even more right-leaning until you are flooded with rightwing propaganda. This type of micro-customisation leads us to live in our bubble zones and consume more of the same type of content, which reinforces existing prejudices.

This is made worse by bots, which are automated accounts that will comment on every post from people who espouse ideas the bot creators want to promote. Bots are very difficult to differentiate from a normal user at first glance. Because of such bot armies, hashtags and posts can go viral very quickly. But these bots are feeding us artificially hyped content on the ‘trending’ and ‘popular near you’ sections of these sites. So, if an agency puts out a fake piece of news, and it gets then further promoted by these bot armies, it gets amplified many times more than the clarification, or the actual facts.

In all this din and noise, opinions get formed, groups get created, votes get cast. As a result, a product gets sold or vilified, or a politician wins an election that they may have otherwise lost. And this is precisely what Cambridge Analytica (CA) stands accused of doing. The current scandal started with a Cambridge University psychologist Aleksandr Kogan who built an app called ‘this is your digital life’. This Facebook app gave Kogan access not only to the data of Facebook users who used the app, but also of the people they were connected to. This led to the personal data of nearly 50 million Facebook users being accessible to Kogan.

While Kogan claimed to Facebook that this was being done purely for research purposes, it is now alleged that he went ahead and sold this information to CA. One of the co-founders of this company was chief strategist on the Donald Trump presidential election campaign Steve Bannon. CA allegedly used this information to do very specific targeted advertising and spread pro-Trump and anit-Clinton propanganda during the US president 2016 elections.

In the wake of this scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a CNN interview that they were informed about this way back in 2016. What they did was to ask Kogan and CA to delete all of the data they had acquired. CA issued them an official confirmation that all of the data had been deleted. Facebook did not undertake to validate this forensically, or involve law enforcement, or inform the 50 million affected users, or even investigate which other apps might have tried to pull off a similar stunt. And this is what makes the entire saga that much more sordid.

We now live in a highly virtualized world. For every event in our lives, our first thought is to post about it online. We don’t realise that Facebook and other social media apps hoover up a tremendous amount of information about our calls, emails, messages, locations, search items, videos we watch online, articles we read, things we buy online. Using this information, it becomes trivial for them to know what makes someone happy or sad, or what someone’s political religious views are etc.

Instead of protecting this private data, the very business model of these companies is built on using this information to feed us content that manipulates us into believing things that organisations want us to believe, and buying things that marketers want us to buy. It might be a good idea to begin paying attention to the #delete facebook movement. And may be even join it.