Facebook has suspended Crimson Hexagon, a Boston firm that analyzes social media posts to identify trends for both corporations and political campaigns, while reviewing how its data might have been used by government clients.
The decision, which followed questions from Wall Street Journal reporters about Crimson Hexagon’s contracts with the U.S. government and one firm linked to the Kremlin, shows how Facebook is addressing increased concern from the American public and Congress about the utilization and safeguarding of electronically-gathered information.
“Facebook has a responsibility to help protect people’s information,” Ime Archibong, vice president for product partnerships, said in a statement. “We are investigating the claims about Crimson Hexagon to see if they violated any of our policies.”
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Founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg promised more transparency about his company’s practices to U.S. lawmakers earlier this year after the revelation that a British consultant for President Trump’s 2016 campaign, Cambridge Analytica, improperly gained access to information on 87 million users. The social media platform has significantly tightened the interfaces that let clients gather aggregated public user data, which is anonymized, for business purposes, Archibong said.
While customers aren’t allowed to build surveillance tools using Facebook or its image-sharing platform Instagram, Facebook doesn’t have insight into contracts between them and any third parties with whom they do business, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Based on Facebook’s review so far, Crimson Hexagon didn’t obtain any information from either Facebook or Instagram inappropriately, a company spokesman said.
Crimson Hexagon — founded by Gary King, a professor at Harvard University who heads its Institute for Quantitative Social Science — specializes in using an algorithm he developed to track public sentiment digitally. Its customers include Anheuser-Busch, Paramount Pictures, Twitter, and the State Department.
According to government records, Crimson Hexagon won a $295,057 contract with the State Department that expired in June, and has a separate agreement with the agency for as much as $778,841 that continues through June 2019.
“Crimson Hexagon is fully cooperating with Facebook, who has publicly stated its investigation to date has found no wrongdoing,” said Chris Bingham, the company’s founding chief technology officer. His firm complies totally with the policies of its data providers, like Twitter and Facebook, that limit the way information can be used, and it never engages in surveillance, Bingham said.
Crimson Hexagon “routinely vets all potential government customers that inquire about the platform and will decline potential customers with use cases that would violate policies of our data partners,” he wrote in a separate company blog post. “Each government customer must contractually commit, in writing, to the detailed use cases that they will be pursuing on the platform.”
The questions about Crimson Hexagon are likely to heighten scrutiny of Facebook, which along with social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube, is already under a spotlight as midterm elections draw closer in the U.S. All three are monitoring content to prevent false articles and posts like those used by Russian agents to influence — and inflame — U.S. voters during the 2016 presidential campaign in which Donald Trump won an unexpected victory against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Already, Facebook has revised its policies to require showing who paid for political advertisements, an attempt to better inform voters about the source of the material they’re viewing.
“Our goal is transparency, and we will continue to strive to find the right balance that is not over-inclusive or under-inclusive,” Monika Bickert, the firm’s head of global policy management, told House members during a Judiciary Committee hearing this week. “We hope these improvements will ensure that Facebook remains a platform for a wide range of ideas.”
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