Facebook is Asking Users if It's 'Good for the World' in a Poll

Facebook has asked an unspecified number of its users if they think Facebook is ‘good for the world.’ The poll seems to be linked to an effort to try and win some trust back from its consumer's post-Cambridge Analytica disaster. 

After news broke that Facebook had allowed third-party apps to gain access to private data and use that to influence political mood, Facebook quickly made changes that allow users to more easily delete their data and dump third-party apps. 

This is a screenshot of a survey question my colleague got from Facebook. "Is Facebook good for the world?" pic.twitter.com/jBmkmNGexc

— Anthony Quintano (@AnthonyQuintano) January 23, 2018

Facebook wants to do better

Access to the poll is under a heading “We’d Like To Do Better” when selected users log in. The questionnaire allows possible responses from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." 

While it took Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg a suspiciously long time to respond to the Cambridge Analytica allegations, he has now come out and says his personal goal for 2018 is to fix Facebook and ensure it is a force for good in the world. 

Cambridge Analytica allegations rock social media users

Facebook has been criticized by many after it was revealed by a whistleblower that UK consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, allegedly misused information from the social network in the 2016 presidential campaign. That isn’t all the bad news for Facebook, last week a leaked memo appeared to champion a culture of aggressive growth over everything else.

Memo suggests growth at all costs

The internal memo written by Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, a top Facebook executive in 2016 was titled 'The Ugly'. "So we connect more people," he wrote in the memo. 

"That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still, we connect people," he continued. 

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"The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good." Bosworth attempted to deflect the severity of the memo by saying he wrote it to be provocative and to stir internal debate inside the company. 

Zuckerberg publicly disagreed with the memo, in a statement, he said, "We've never believed the ends justify the means. We recognize that connecting people isn't enough by itself. We also need to work to bring people closer together." 

Facebook users may decline

Facebook, has more than 2 billion users, but statistics suggest this number may steeply decline in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica controversy. CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk has deleted the Facebook pages of SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity. 

He later tweeted "I don't use [Facebook] & never have, so don't think I'm some kind of martyr or my companies are taking a huge blow," Musk tweeted later. "Also, we don't advertise or pay for endorsements, so … don't care."