A Facebook spokesperson on Friday stated that the social networking giant would take down posts on US President’s impeachment inquiry. After this, Zuckerberg’s team took this decision when critics raised questions on the company’s privacy policies. After the name of the Ukrainian Whistleblower surfaced on Facebook and Twitter, news agencies slammed the former for incompetence in maintaining privacy on the matter.
“The mentions of the whistleblower’s name will be removed from all sources on Facebook. This must be done so that the person is not targeted in any form by intelligence agencies of the US,” said the spokesperson.
There were millions of paid advertisements that mentioned the name of Whistleblower on FB. With the US Elections looming around the corner, cyber experts suspect this as a handiwork of cyber cells. They are rooting for Trump’s second term as the President. The President’s impeachment inquiry did not go down well with these people.
Damage Has Already Been Done: Sources
Facebook took down all the said advertisements, which will affect the reference sites as well but, the move came much later than expected, say critics. “The damage has already been done in the few hours the ads popped up on Facebook News Feeds,” said an FB official who wished to remain unnamed. “Now that they have been removed makes little difference as the name has already been popularised.”
Interestingly, Whatsapp forwards and screenshots cannot be undone or removed which function on end-to-end encryptions. Therefore, the posts that found it’s way into Whatsapp and other encrypted messaging sites, are still being shared.
The Whistleblower alleged that the White House tried to hide the fact about the Trump-Ukraine talks. After these allegations were made, Trump openly asked the Whistleblower to be unmasked. This ultimately did happen after his son, Trump Jr., shared a link that had details about the Whistleblower. Now, Facebook has a daunting task ahead, keeping such links away from its servers.