Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

7.3.3
 
Governments
Governments ought to come up with strict regulations to protect user privacy. A good 
trendsetter is the European Union, which is vocal concerning the collection and sharing of the 
data of users in the region. The EU was quick to react to Facebook’s addition of a certain 
setting in their newly acquired platform, WhatsApp. The setting that came auto enabled made 
WhatsApp send back user data to Facebook. The EU protects the privacy of the data of users 
in its region. However, outside the EU, everything changes. Entire governments seem to be 
unconcerned about the suffering of their citizens on social media platforms. Governments sit 
back and watch as the data of their citizens is sold off without their consent. It is the 
responsibility of any government to protect its citizens. Therefore, they should protect them 
from the dangers they face when they are online. One of these dangers is the infringement of 
their privacy by social media companies. Governments need to follow the example of the EU 
and put in place very strict regulations designed to discourage social media platforms from 
unethically collecting and using the data of their citizens. Key changes to EU regulations on 
user data have been provided in appendix B of this document. 
Governments have the power to call for a total ban of a platform that does not abide 
by its data privacy rules in their countries. Shutting of some social media platforms is 
possible and has already been demonstrated in countries such as China and Iran (Papic and 
Noonan, 2011). This is very effective since a significant loss of revenues is felt by the social 
media platforms. If the governments in an entire region decide to ban any social media 
platform that does not play by the rules, it is guaranteed that the platform will willingly or 
unwillingly have to play by the rules. A total ban from an entire region would mean that the 
revenues received from advertisers in that region are lost and also the reputation of the 
platform becomes soiled. Governments can also call for the removal of some clauses on 
social media privacy policies that degrade the capabilities of users in securing their data. It 

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should not be up to someone in Facebook to wake up and think about what to add or remove 
from privacy policies. The government should intervene in situations such as these and call 
for the removal of such additions. Governments should also introduce severe punishments 
and fines to platforms that violate users’ privacy. Current fines and punishments seem to be 
too lenient and these platforms can simply break rules because they can afford to pay the 
fines. Social media platforms simply do a calculation of the expected fine against what they 
stand to gain from a particular violation. If they have a lot to gain from a violation, they do it 
and just pay the fine. Fines should be so high such that these platforms cannot dare to violate 
some rights. 
Lastly, governments ought to work in collaboration with users to ensure that identity 
thieves, spammers, scammers, and social engineers are apprehended and their accounts are 
permanently shut down. It is easy to do this as users can be told to report such people to a 
government account. Currently, users only have the option of reporting such people to the 
social media companies. Robots put in place by the companies determine whether or not to 
block the reported account. If there was an option to report such an issue to the government, 
the culprit would be followed up and put behind bars. This would make social media 
platforms safer.