ABSTRACT
In April 2018, after Cambridge Analytica captured global attention, Facebook embarked on its biggest-ever advertising campaign to try to rebuild trust. Prior to Cambridge Analytica, Facebook had also run a series of ads in early 2018 illustrating how small businesses in the UK had benefitted from their association with Facebook. Facebook’s ownership of Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger has expanded the range of affordances. They are amongst the top 5 downloaded applications on the two major mobile phone application stores, Apple and Google Play. Facebook Messenger does not use end-to-end encryption but encrypts messages by default from the sender to its server and then encrypts them again between the server and the recipient. Facebook, like other communications technologies before it, was a facilitator of protest, but what ultimately matters is year-by-year on-the-ground mobilisation. Those who’ve worked at Facebook are conscious of the changes that they have wrought.
