There has been a great deal of scrutiny surrounding the 2016 presidential election, especially with the numerous accusations concerning Russian meddling. The Russians supposedly influenced the election through the social media platform, Facebook. Their objective was to disrupt our electoral process and indirectly supporting Trump in the election. President Trump has repeatedly denied these allegations repetedly and continues to believe that there was no tampering in the election let alone meddling by Russia.

This belief is not shared by the executive branches’ own intelligence organizations. However, the majority of the blame has been placed on Facebook, which has recently come under fire for several privacy violations and suspected misuse of user data.

These allegations are derived from the results of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation and the Cambridge Analytica data leak. The culmination of these incidents was a 10 hour long testimony from Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, before Congress. During his testimony, Zuckerberg was repeatedly questioned over Facebook users’ ability to turn off Facebook’s access to their data, and how Facebook secures its data and issuing that data to 3^rd parties.

These questions went mostly unanswered by Mr. Zuckerberg, who veered away from them by affirming that Facebook would soon include all information in its data accessibility feature and that the social media platform would comply with strict European privacy laws. These answers largely angered the congressmen, as they didn’t address the concerns of the nation.

As a global social media outlet, Facebook has acquired a level of power in the day to day life of millions of people. This influence has enabled the world to interconnect and develop a global community, but has simultaneously made this community vulnerable to the misuse of it’s own information.