By: Ezra Ashkenazi
There has been a plethora of news regarding Facebook and its privacy scandal, including an enormous data leak to a political research firm Cambridge Analytica. According to The Post, the Federal Trade Commission opened its investigation in March 2018, after hearing reports that Cambridge Analytica had personal information about almost 100 million Facebook users, and that using this personal information, they were sending political ads during the 2016 presidential election.
The scandal has finally come to an end with the Federal Trade Commission penalizing Facebook with an astounding 5 billion dollar fine. The next largest fine was given to Google, they were fined 22.5 million dollars, an amount that is inconsequential compared to Facebook’s fine. According to a New York Post article, the penalty was approved with a vote of three to two, the three being all Republicans and the two being Democrats. For investors, however, the fine is incomparable to the penalties that Facebook was threatened with.
One of the possible penalties being a relocation of Facebook’s acquisitions, one of them being Instagram, and another being WhatsApp. Wall street feared that the FTC would punish Facebook with more than just a fine, so investors all took a huge sigh of relief when that wasn’t so. In conclusion, although Facebook was slapped with a record- breaking fine, Wall Street is happy that the fine is all they were slapped with.
(Ezra Ashkenazi is currently an intern in the Jewish Voice Student Journalist Initiative)
