Digital privacy issues have become a major concern and keeping track of reactions and responses to prominent scandals is pivotal. This case study analyzes a recent Facebook security breach reported in April 2021 with attention to the event’s local, national, and global media portrayals. Common media consumers’ responses to the topic are similar, especially in relation to supporting Ireland’s movement against Facebook, but local media in California manifest excessive optimism regarding the breach’s influences compared to the other levels.
There are notable differences between local and national/international sources in recognizing the potential harm to Facebook users whose confidential information has been posted for sale. Regarding local coverage in California, the state in which Facebook is headquartered, some materials in the Los Angeles Times tend to understate the issue’s large-scale consequences. Lazarus (2021) highlights that users’ exposed data, including names, dates of birth, physical locations, and contact information, “may pose relatively little risk to people’s privacy” (para. 4). In contrast, national-level sources, including the Insider, are less optimistic concerning the breach. The mentioned source’s staff journalists rely on digital security specialists’ predictions, including the possibility of instrumentalizing the exposed data to impersonate users and commit identity crimes (Holmes, 2021). Using appeals to authority and credibility, Holmes (2021) cites Alon Gal, a cybercrime intelligence professional, to review the breach’s helpfulness for criminal plans. Sources outside of the U.S., including BBC and the Irish Mirror, also confirm the event’s seriousness through the selection of epithets and raising cybercrime and identity theft topics (BBC News Staff, 2021; Kent, 2021). Therefore, the security breach’s possible consequences find heterogeneous media coverage.
From a global standpoint, it is possible to discover only some slight differences between the perspectives of unrelated news sources in other parts of the world aside from the U.S. In particular, the related publications vary in terms of criticizing Facebook’s reactions to the incident. As an example, the publication in the Irish Mirror briefly reports well-established facts regarding the number of exposed accounts and complaints from Facebook users and focuses on comparisons between diverse incidents (Kent, 2021). In contrast, BBC emphasizes Facebook’s insufficient sense of social responsibility manifested in internal communication about the event (BBC News Staff, 2021). The absence of extreme diversity in coverage might stem from the incident’s non-political nature and the lack of threats for influential individuals or agencies.
The presence of reaction movements and their similarities and differences constitute another crucial point for discussion. Instead of multiple movements against social media giants’ imperfect privacy guarantees, the event resulted in the activities of a state-level civil rights group in Ireland. Specifically, Digital Rights Ireland invited Irish Facebook users and other affected customers in the European Union to join its campaign and sue Facebook’s managerial team for damages to service consumers (U/[deleted], 2021). Aside from encouraging Facebook to offer new privacy protections, the digital rights lobbying group sought to get monetary compensation for affected users, which became a crucial motivator for individuals to join the initiative (U/[deleted], 2021). The agency anticipated the campaign to become the largest mass action against social media giants. No prominent movements apart from the aforementioned one emerged outside of the U.S., which nullifies the opportunity for making inter-movement comparisons.
To continue, finding specific dissimilarities between media consumers’ reactions in different parts of the world might be problematic. The reason for it is that the audiences’ perceptions are likely to depend on individuals’ IT and cybersecurity literacy rather than the fact of living in a specific country. Considering this, common consumers’ perceptions of the scandal are not varied, which finds reflection in a discussion thread started by an anonymous user on Reddit, an international forum for English-speaking populations (U/[deleted], 2021). Based on the leading comments in the thread, most users are positive towards the need for action against Facebook and take the data breach incident seriously, resulting in massive support for anti-Facebook rhetorics (U/[deleted], 2021). From individual comments’ social karma counts, it is also visible that media consumers doubt that collective lawsuits are more effective compared to individual ones (U/[deleted], 2021). Such statements might stem from perceptions that overly massive responses dilute social issues and understate the most affected parties’ suffering and losses. With that in mind, media consumers’ reactions to the incident and the subsequent action against Facebook are quite homogenous at the international level.
Finally, local news sources’ ways of portraying the issue are notably different from the coverage at the national and the international levels in terms of using expert opinions and recognizing the risks for users. Instead of promoting various separate initiatives, the event resulted in one movement in Ireland with some contributions from the European Union. From the global standpoint, common media consumers’ reactions to the security incident and the resulting cases against Facebook mainly represent the anti-tech-giant standpoint without notable country-related dissimilarities.
References
BBC News Staff. (2021). Facebook downplays data breach in internal email.BBC News. Web.
Holmes, A. (2021). 533 million Facebook users’ phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online. Insider. Web.
Kent, D. (2021). Facebook down: Over 1 billion users affected by massive outage amid ‘data breach.’ Irish Mirror. Web.
Lazarus, D. (2021). Column: Facebook and Health Net hacks drive home the need for a national privacy law. Los Angeles Times. Web.
U/[deleted]. (2021). Thousands urged to sue Facebook in mass action over leaked data [Online forum post]. Reddit. Web.