2. Mark Zuckerberg
Is Mark Zuckerberg a celebrity? He is definitely well known, what with being one of the founders of Facebook, arguably the internet’s social media behemoth to end all behemoths. Don’t think these are all good reasons, though. 2018 has been a tumultuous year for Zuckerberg and Facebook in general, and especially when his company began to butt up against the world of politics.
Really, it all started around two years ago, in 2016. That’s when people began to suspect that a social media company that hosts the profiles of everyone from kids to seniors the world over might have a hand in shaping a society’s political views. Sure would be bad if that social media company didn’t really have any safeguards against people who might outright lie in an attempt to sway minds and elections alike.
At that point, it looked like Zuckerberg and Facebook’s other leaders might be sinning by lack of vision. Maybe, just maybe, they didn’t think things through. That’s bad, to be sure, and may have had a big part to do with swaying voters towards an unqualified and unpredictable presidential candidate.
In April, Zuckerberg testified before Congress about a particularly egregious breach of user data. Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm connected to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, had taken the user data of about 87 million Facebook users in an attempt to create voter profiles in 2016. Those users, as you may well guess, were not asked for their data.
Lawmakers grilled Zuckerberg for hours, asking questions about the data breach, Facebook’s bias towards or against news sources, and the company’s possible role in Russian election meddling.