Facebook has continued to experience a fall in market value even when data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, accused of breaching privacy policies of users’ data on Facebook has suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix.
Cambridge Analytica suspended after Nix after he confessed in a leaked video that his company had played a decisive role in Trump’s election victory.
The data analytics firm, however, said it will launch an independent investigation to determine if the company actually engaged in any wrongdoing in its work on political campaigns.
Facebook has been rocked this week by a whistleblower who said that Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based political firm hired by Trump for the 2016 campaign, had improperly accessed information on 50 million Facebook users.
The social media company has lost 60 billion dollars of its stock market value over the last two days over fears that its dealings with Cambridge Analytica might damage its reputation, deter advertisers and invite tougher regulation.
Facebook said the data was harvested by Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology academic, who created an app on the platform that was downloaded by 270,000 people.
It says he then violated its policies by passing the data to Cambridge Analytica.
“The events of the past week have been a total shell shock,” Kogan told the BBC.
“My view is that I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica when… we thought we were doing something that was really normal.
“We were assured by Cambridge Analytica that everything was perfectly legal and within the terms of service,” he added.
Kogan said the accuracy of the dataset had been “exaggerated” by Cambridge Analytica, and that the information was more likely to hurt Trump’s campaign.
