Facebook Cambridge Analytical Ethical Dilemma: Organisational Problem Analysis

This study analyzes the Facebook Cambridge Analytical Ethical Dilemma and its impact on the company's reputation and market image. It explores the factors contributing to the problem and recommends effective communication strategies to prevent further damage.

Running head: FACEBOOK
Individual Organisational Problem Analysis Report
[Facebook Cambridge Analytical Ethical Dilemma]
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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Executive summary
The study revolves around a political scandal "Facebook Cambridge Analytical Ethical
Dilemma" that caused reputational damage to Facebook. The study finds that the scandal has
done both reputational and monetary loss to Facebook. Facebook had to lose a few of its users as
these users lost their trust in Facebook. This could have been avoided from happening had
Facebook addressed the issue in public at the earliest. However, the study has found Facebook as
being late to give an answer to the scandal. The study finds the initiatives being taken by
Facebook to repair their lost image as very powerful. However, the study feels a missing link
between the company and its users, which is effective communication. The study recommends
that effective communication with users could help Facebook prevent its market image from
damaging.

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Table of Contents
1. Describing the real case organisation..........................................................................................3
2. The organisational behaviour factors that contributed to the problem........................................4
SWOT analysis:...........................................................................................................................4
PESTEL analysis:........................................................................................................................6
3. Steps adopted to address issue.....................................................................................................8
3. Conclusion and Recommendations..............................................................................................9
References......................................................................................................................................11

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1. Describing the real case organisation
The chosen real case organisation is the “Facebook Cambridge Analytical Ethical
Dilemma” that produced an example of a reputed company criticised for a data privacy issue.
The Facebook-Cambridge Analytical Data Scandal could be considered a major political scandal.
The scandal happened in the early 2018 and came to the notice when the news became public
that Cambridge Analytica had misused and unethically accessed the data of 50 million of
Facebook users without their consent (Dig.watch 2019). These pieces of data were being used for
wrong purposes such as for posting ads that were quite relevant to each profile; however, not
sharing with them a more unbiased view of the post.
As per what was being confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg while addressing the issue
raised, Mark Zuckerberg was not sure about this scandal and so. However, an immediate claim
was being made by Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook has not any direct involvement in the
scandal. Confirmation was also being made stating that Facebook will investigate the matter.
With passing days Facebook arrived at a conclusion for this scandal. Facebook decided to
suspend Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) and Cambridge Analytica who is the
political data analytics company for Facebook (Theverge.com 2019).
However, this may not be regarded as an answer to what Facebook is doing to stop such
practices from happening in the future. It is a responsibility for any business to have practice in
place that determines its social responsibility. One of the key responsibilities of any business is
to behave ethically correct and effectively minimise its adverse social impact (Singh and Sandhu
2016). The Facebook-Cambridge Analytical Data Scandal is a kind of ethical challenge to
Facebook. The findings of this study will suggest whether or not Facebook was able to reduce its
adverse social impact with this social scandal.

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2. The organisational behaviour factors that contributed to the problem
Organisational behaviour does greatly impact how the business will be performed and
how any cases of criticism will be taken care off. Facebook does not require any introduction.
The brand is well known to even the people in small age groups. Needleless to mention it is
hugely popular across the globe. It is being considered a useful platform to interact with people
situated around the globe. Facebook users know that their data is highly secured and prevented
from any sort of data theft. They are provided with many customisation options which provide
than an authority to either allow a person or disallow another from seeing the content posted in
one’s wall (Ching et al. 2015). Despite all these being the facts if a data scandal case as such the
Facebook-Cambridge Analytical Data Scandal happens, users will definitely lose their trust in
the company. On a similar note, this section is concerned with organisational behaviour, which
has contributed to the problem. Moreover, this will help in giving a few recommendations to the
company to help overcome the chosen scandal. The purpose will be served by conducting a
SWOT and PESTEL analysis of Facebook. The analysis will help to identify the organisational
behaviours those that possibly had provided ways to such political dilemma.
SWOT analysis:
Strengths:
Facebook is still the leading social media platform across the globe. Once, only being
used by college goers has now become integral to people of all age groups. Even Facebook ads
and sponsored posts can be used to promote a business or sell a product. It is second only to
Google in regards to the advertisement. Facebook has the largest customer base among all social
media platforms (van Dam and Van De Velden 2015). The fact makes sense that this is the most

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preferred location for promoting a business rather than going for a less popular social media
platform “Twitter”. Facebook ads are so in demands that reputed marketing and consulting firms
take this as an opportunity on a serious note and develop expertise on how to effectively use this
platform for doing advertisement. Facebook is also considered the father of many other social
media platforms like WhatsApp Messenger and Instagram (Li and Agarwal 2016). Each one of
these platforms has its strengths. Instagram is popular for sharing photos and videos. On the
other hand, WhatsApp is hugely popular as texting and calling app. WhatsApp Messenger is
hugely secured as it safeguards messages through end-to-end encryption (Kumar and Sharma
2017). With Instagram and WhatsApp Messenger Facebook seems like have effectively planned
their growth over the years. Despite being into criticism on a few occasions there is no stoppage
to Facebook as it continues to add more new users. The number of its users is constantly
growing.
Weaknesses:
Data breaches and privacy concerns are one factor that keeps generating new challenges
for the company. One of the examples of data breaches is the topic itself, which has been chosen
for this study. The “Facebook Cambridge Analytical Ethical Dilemma” presents a kind of data
and ethical scandal ever being faced by Facebook. The scandal results in a drop in stocks
(Dig.watch 2019). Such criticism will continue to occur unless Facebook has a robust system to
securely harvest user information. It is worth noting that the local people and the national
governments lack an adequate understanding of data related process. Hence, any cases of data
scandal will bring problem straightaway to Facebook. It least matters whether Facebook is
actually involved in such cases. According to many reports, Facebook is losing its customers

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considerably as to all those customers Facebook has not yet taken any bold move to provide
absolute security to users’ data (CNBC.com 2019).
Opportunities:
Facebook has diversified its user base mainly due to acquisitions of WhatsApp and
Instagram. WhatsApp and Instagram are used by people of all age groups for various purposes.
This means Facebook will now be able to reach to a more diverse consumer base. Hence, new
services can help to tap these untouched market segments. This will further help Facebook to
attain a dominating position across various social media platforms. However, a very good
understanding of what customers perceive of Facebook and what are their perceptions of the
platform should be clearly understood to the brand (Singh et al. 2017). This is required to plan,
design and offer the most relevant services to both new and existing customers of Facebook.
Threats:
Competition has increased leading to a much narrower clash with other biggies like
Google. Additionally, there are restrictions put against the usage of Facebook across various
public and private sector companies like Apple, Inc. Beta versions of Facebook was on agreed
terms was designed only for Apple's customers. However, Apple has found Facebook making
these versions available also to the public. As a result, Apple has shown concerns to these issues
and avoiding usage of critical apps of Facebook. Given the situation, it looks evident that any
sort of a data scandal would severely affect the market reputation of Facebook in both the public
and private sectors, and also among the local people (Georgalou 2016). There is no stoppage to
the number of Facebook users. With a growing user base, the need for a much robust
infrastructure is also rising. To avoid server failures, to keep everything running smoothly and to

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attain a technically correct infrastructure needed to counter data breaches, the amount of
spending on the operations should also be increased (Lindberg et al. 2015). The fact can affect
the profit margin for Facebook.
PESTEL analysis:
In this section, Facebook will be analysed with respect to various external environmental factors.
Political:
Facebook has a third party service provider for posting political messages and videos on
the Facebook platform in the form of Cambridge Analytica. The “Facebook Cambridge
Analytical Ethical Dilemma” is a scandal that revealed misusing of users’ information in favour
of a political party. President Mr. Donald Trump used Cambridge Analytica in his favour to
promote all positive thing about Trump on Facebook while ensuring negative publicity for the
opponent party. Cambridge Analytica used Facebook users’ information to filter the posts and
videos according to their interest while posting all negative messages and videos for the
opponent party. In this way, Cambridge Analytica unethically without any consent of Facebook
users affected the authenticity level of the platform (Theverge.com 2019).
Economic:
Facebook has become a platform to promote and nurture businesses through advertising,
enhanced brand value and customer referrals. Facebook supports a close to thousands of jobs.
Facebook also has its existence in the stock market (Goodwin et al. 2016). All these just indicate
the true capability of Facebook to influence a business both in negative and positive ways.
Social:

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Facebook allows its users to remain in touch with their friends, relatives and dear ones
round the clock. Access to Facebook has become ever easier with an advent and the increasingly
growing popularity of smartphone users. Facebook can easily be used to influence the thoughts
of thousands and millions of its users (Alzougool 2018). It just requires a few posts containing
influencing contents such as political dilemma to be uploaded on the individual Facebook
profile.
Technological:
Facebook users range of technologies to support a wider application of the app such as
sharing of videos and messages etc. The servers for Facebook run on LAMP (Linux, Apache,
MySQL and PHP). Various languages are used such as Java, C++, Python and Erlang. These
languages are used to design and create a variety of services to be offered to Facebook users
(Hoffmann, Proferes and Zimmer 2018).
Environmental:
Carbon footprint impact of Facebook as published in some reports is quite smaller than
Google. The annual figure for Facebook’s carbon emissions was somewhere around 285,000
metric tons of CO2 in 2011 (Theguardian.com, 2019). This is far much lesser than Google’s
1.5m tons in 2010 (Theguardian.com, 2019). The majority of these emissions are from
Facebook’s data centers in the United States of America (Theguardian.com, 2019).
Legal:
Facebook faces very limited challenges from the existing legislative structures. Some of
the most impactful legislation include the Communications Act, Public Order Act and the
Criminal Justice Act (Bonsón, Royo and Ratkai 2015).

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3. Steps adopted to address the issue
All this information as above indicates that the political and social influence of Facebook
has the highest impact on the company. Moreover, Facebook is also vulnerable to intentional
political attacks as political activities are controlled by a third party service provider for
Facebook. Cambridge Analytica provides supports on political contents to Facebook. This means
Cambridge Analytica can also misuse its expertise in influencing people as per the demand of a
political party. It has done so for Mr. Donald Trump during the election time. Hence, it can be
said that Facebook’s dependability on Cambridge Analytica for supports on political contents
makes it vulnerable to possible scandals such as the “Facebook Cambridge Analytical Ethical
Dilemma” (Dig.watch 2019).
As part of Facebook’ initiative towards consolidating its image being hit by the
“Facebook Cambridge Analytical Ethical Scandal”, Facebook announced a separation from
Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) and Cambridge Analytica, which is the political
data analytics company for SCL (Theverge.com 2019). In addition, an image repairing message
has finally poured in from Mark Zuckerberg. He confirmed that Facebook is working on this
issue to ensure no such things get repeated in the future. Mark Zuckerberg further confirmed that
it is the responsibility of Facebook to protect its users’ data (Theverge.com 2019). He also
confirmed a three-step plan to rebuild the lost trust. One of the significant moves is discouraging
developers from accessing one’ Facebook account if not being used for three months. Facebook
will also perform regular audits of the app (Theverge.com 2019).
3. Conclusion and Recommendations

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On a concluding note, it can be said that any misuse of Facebook such as the “Facebook
Cambridge Analytical Ethical Dilemma” should not directly be related to Facebook’s desire to
do so. Indeed, Facebook’s inability to control such scandals should be mostly blamed for this. It
is their responsibility to have sufficient resources in place to counter any such scandals and
prevent users’ information from being misused. The initiatives being taken by Facebook as a
response to the scandal looks effective. However, they should also work on their communication
strategy as they were very late in addressing the issue publically and in adopting relevant
initiatives as well.
On a recommending note, it can be said that Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook's
officials should involve in healthy communication with their customers. Any such scandals
should be addressed on an early note to give the company an outside chance to prevent their
image from damaging.

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