THE Philippines has the second highest number of affected Facebook accounts all over the world that may have been improperly shared with the British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook said at least 1.175-million accounts from the Philippines may have been affected by the data sharing.
The US had the highest number of affected accounts out of the total of 87-million affected users, which prompted several changes to what data Application Programming Interfaces from third-party apps could access.
Facebook’s estimate was far higher than the news reports suggesting 50-million users maay have been affected in the privacy scandal that has roiled the company and sparked questions for the entire internet sector on data protection.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters on a conference call he accepted responsibility for the failure to protect user data, but maintained he was still the best person to lead the network of two-billion users.
“I think life is about learning from the mistakes and figuring out how to move forward,” he said in response to a question on his ability to lead the company.
In a report published in the South China Morning Post, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company Strategic Communication Laboratories said it helped Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte win the 2016 elections by branding him as a “tough crime fighter” in his social media campaign.
“In the run-up to the national elections the incumbent client was widely perceived as both kind and honorable, qualities his campaign team thought were potentially election-winning,” the SCMP quoted SCL’s website.
According to the same report, Alexander Nix, a senior executive of SCL, came to Manila after the election in 2016 and gave a revealing talk at a National Press Club event about how his company uses data for political campaigning.
“But SCL’s research showed that many groups within the electorate were more likely to be swayed by qualities such as toughness and decisiveness. SCL used the cross-cutting issue of crime to rebrand the client as a strong, no-nonsense man of action, who would appeal to the true values of the voters.”
At the event, Nix even bragged that they had seen a “100-percent success rate” in 100 election campaigns in Asia, Africa, India and western Europe.
He even said the firm’s methods could get a “fundamentally flawed” candidate” elected by maximizing their “likable traits.”
Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify at the United States House of Representatives next week over the data breach scandal.
