Re: Collapse of Facebook
I think you mean too Rich to be caught !!! :)
It is very unlikely that Facebook will fail, they have the means to keep all this bouncing through the courts for years.
I fully expect that Facebook will be 'Not Implicated' and Cambridge Analytica will 'fail for them' !!!
Don't count on that. Given the nature of Cambridge Analytica's operations (seemingly, tampering with elections), there's a good chance that the ICO will be instructed by the UK government to really take them (where "them" = Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and literally anyone else who might be doing anything like this) to pieces on this one.
The ICO (and similar bodies around the world) already has all the powers it needs; no new laws are required. What might be needed is more staff. So the ICO might be asked by government, "Need a bigger budget to take on enough staff to do a full tear down on a huge operation like Facebook?", "Yes please", "No problems, here you go.".
That'll take time, and any interim hint of the case being real and having anything to do with elections could easily result in interim court orders being issued. That would have an immediate impact on Facebook's business.
Electoral tampering is about the worst possible thing that can happen in a democracy, as it can push a country in a direction from which there is no quick recovery (e.g. leaving the EU, electing a ruinous leader, etc). The merest hint that this is the kind of thing that has been going on and governments (presumably not the current US administration) will be all over it.
The significance of the Press / Broadcast Journalism
I have to say, this is one of the most significant pieces of investigative journalism I've seen in recent decades. This is why you need a free press / tv news journalism, and a corp of properly trained journalists. AI generated news feeds on Facebook, Google are not the same thing. Can you imagine an investigative journalist being able to get such a story distributed on line by, say, Facebook? No.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
