The breakout session on "Consequences of digital monocultures on societies" offered a rare chance for the audience: an actual Q&A with a Facebook representative. With Facebook under fire recently over questions about handling data, interest was high.
In May this year a study by the University of Warwick linked right-wing anti-refugee sentiments on Facebook with violence against refugees in Germany. "We are still evaluating on that topic," Mr Rens said. He referred to online-hatred turning into offline-violence in Asian countries such as Myanmar, where false information about Muslim minorities spread via Facebook's subsidiary Whatsapp eventually led to the murder of innocent people. "What we have done, as a consequence, is sending all our users banners explaining that the rumours did not belong to Whatsapp but were spread by users. That phenomena is especially more dramatic in developing countries than, for example, in Europe."
Besides the moral question of responsibility for online hate-speech, Mr Rens saw the identification of fake news and fake networks as Facebook's biggest challenge today. "We have big troubles in dealing with democracy. We painfully had to realise that there were fake accounts from Russia and Iran destabilising democracy, which we had to remove." The worst scenario Mr Rens could imagine was that election results would not be acknowledged due to fake actors delegitimising democratic processes.
When Mr Rens was confronted with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, he denied that Facebook had ever been selling data to advertising agencies. "The Cambridge Analytica case was a huge scandal, I cannot deny that. It was a lesson for Facebook. We are now in a clearing up process where we ask ourselves how we can protect user data in the future. As a result, combined with the General Data Protection Regulation, we are handling the integration of third provider applications more restrictively and remodelled the entire platform," Mr Rens said.
The collection and misuse of personal data of 87 million Facebook users starting from 2014 by Cambridge Analytica in order to influence voter opinion on behalf of politicians such as Donald Trump or Ted Cruz has led to a loss of 100 billion Dollars of Facebook's stock market value this year. Facebook proved to be resilient and its share price recovered only four months later. Today it keeps its position as the world's most popular social network with an ever expanding community.
Still, Mr Rens was worried about losing its grip on the younger target group. "Among teenagers Facebook is not in vogue anymore," he said. Europeans use 20 different apps to communicate nowadays and every year around 1,5 million new applications are introduced in the Google Play Store. "Every single app could potentially threaten our position," Mr Rens conceded.
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