Blog 3: Antitrust Investigation

As Americans, we are in an age that is defined by the developments in social media. Over the past couple of decades, the internet has seen the emergence of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and more media that stores our information. As Dr. Smith emphasized in class, these media advertise the idea of building a strong community, Facebook especially. Facebook does more than create a community- it is paid to sell your personal information. This creates a lot of suspicion in the users and they are thus hesitant to post too much. Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, assembled a multi-state coalition of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee “to determine whether Facebook’s actions may have endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, or increased the price of advertising” (Fung). All of these states are participating in this antitrust investigation towards not only Facebook but also Google.

The article states that there will be several court cases against several people to see whether or not Facebook uses this information with harmful intent. In addition, the article mentions Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s Attorney General who believes Google is dominating online advertising because it is inefficient to advertise on any other platforms. This is interesting because if somebody searches Google for something, that thing will come up on an advertisement 5 minutes later on a different website, so Google definitely keeps track of the user’s information. This is a somewhat disturbing concept to consider seeing how reliant our culture is on social media and the internet. People post on social media and use Google every day. Thankfully Facebook is not used as much as Instagram for example but still, what the user puts in is what the company makes its money off of. Facebook is disrupting our privacy and raises the following question: Do Instagram and Snapchat sell our information too, and if so, does this also apply to private accounts? Surely users cannot access these without a follow request but can the owners? And what becomes of the personal information that is sold? These are all complicated questions that show how careful people need to be when they post on social media, as there has to be a balance between being inoffensive and also being sure not to post too much personal information.

Link to article: https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/06/tech/facebook-antitrust-investigation/index.html