Ubuntu Ethics and Information Warfare

In my Case Analysis of Information Warfare, I answer the following question:

Did Facebook engage in Information Warfare? Why or why not? Is Facebook responsible in any way for the outcome of the 2016 election? Why?

By analyzing Facebook’s actions via the lens of Ubuntu ethics I was able to conclude Facebook had a job and that;

“This job relates to a tenet of Ubuntu Ethics where “none of us are free so long as even one of us is enslaved”(Wittkower, 2019). Those with job roles with this responsibility of recognition should have then recognized that users of Facebook were enslaved to misinformation and influence. In order for Facebook address its enslaved consumers it should have proactively reconfigured the usage of their site and blocked the “dark”(Madrigal, 2016) traffic from spreading “misinformation”(Madrigal, 2016) to protect the people of its community. Facebook had and still has a responsibility to the customer base that uses its site to be transparent, and to issue due respect to its users and their data. Facebook knew for a fact that the users of Facebook were liable to influence via the information that is and was spread on their site and it is Facebook’s responsibility to contain, control, or discontinue the spread of political misinformation in order to address the issues that came to fruition during the 2016 presidential election”(Burnett, 2019).

Burnett, J. (19AD, November 16). 7.4 Complete Case Analysis. Retrieved November 30, 2019, from https://www.blackboard.odu.edu/ultra/courses/_347180_1/cl/outline.

This analysis also drew me to an awareness of how the lack of care, responsibility, and respect to consumers and the surrounding public can fail a community of people as widespread as an entire nation just by the use of a platform that exists in the cyberspace. As such actors, innovators, and professionals in the cyberspace have a responsibility to ethically react and respond however that may be.