Survey Indicates Most Facebook Users Not Bothered By Recent Scandals

Facebook has dealt with a continuous series of public relations scandals throughout 2018, leading to some concern about the long-term viability of the Mark Zuckerberg-led social network. However, a new survey of Facebook and Instagram users found that most subscribers are unconcerned with the stream of negative press linked to the widely used website, according to CNBC.

Asset management firm Piper Jaffray released a study of 1,300 U.S. users of both Facebook and its photo-sharing Instagram subsidiary, with two-thirds of respondents claiming they use those apps as much as a year ago, in perhaps an indication that most Facebook users were unfazed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Even the other one-third of users might use Facebook and Instagram more than they let on, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Michael Olson.

"While one-third of users did suggest they're using Facebook and Instagram less than last year, we suspect there is a greater tendency for users to under-report their usage,” Olson said in Piper Jaffray’s note.

Facebook’s privacy troubles have dominated headlines since early 2018. It started in March with the onset of the Cambridge Analytica debacle. The London-based right-wing election consulting firm harvested the data of 87 million American Facebook users without their explicit consent, using information collected from a personality quiz on the website.

That data was used by Cambridge Analytica to feed political content to users on behalf of Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential bid. The scandal eroded public trust in Facebook’s ability to protect user information. In the aftermath, Zuckerberg had to testify before the U.S. Congress and European Parliament, with several politicians expressing dissatisfaction with his answers.

Facebook has also drawn scrutiny for other deals. Over the summer, Facebook revealed it had long-standing data-sharing partnerships with dozens of hardware companies that gave massive amounts of user information away without users knowing it. Some of the companies included Chinese firms like Huawei, which the U.S. government often views as a security threat. Facebook was also recently accused of giving unusual protections to far-right pages that posted hateful content.