The announcement of Alex Stamos leaving Facebook has brought a lot of skeletons out of graves. Facebook is once again being associated with the Russian operatives’ influence in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the news of the resignation of Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos started doing rounds, the cause of this decision soon became a bigger news.
Stamos reportedly recommended more information to be made public on how the social media platform was utilized by Russian agents to create propaganda and influence the 2016 presidential elections, however, this was reportedly not accepted by Facebook. After being taken to task by the US legislators for its usage to send hateful messages and fake news during the elections, Facebook recently faced the brunt again when Cambridge Analytica proclaimed how they could ingress data of nearly 50 million users to create a ripple during the elections.
Stamos had aggressively expressed condemned the revelation by Cambridge Analytica on the data harvest, although he later deleted the tweet.
Stamos, whose role has now been changed to exploring emerging risks, is no longer allowed to supervise Facebook’s response to government-sponsored disinformation. Although, there’s news of his departure from the company by August, Stamos hasn’t confirmed anything yet. Facebook too hasn’t made any comments on his departure. The social media giant reportedly sent its forensic auditors to the intelligence firm Cambridge Analytica for ensuring deletion of the data acquired by them.