Ignoring the unrelated 30-min digression about grammar (sic), I’m not tempted to excuse him: he shared personal-level data, including names, with a company that was openly Orwellian. They didn’t hide what they were doing. People started paying attention when they went from sowing division and crafting racist campaign in South-East Asia and Africa to Western countries, but they did not hide their methods before or after. I guess the podcast is making a good case that he’s awkward and naive but that shouldn’t prevent him from seeing the consequence of his sharing his research data.

The biased story seems to ignore that Facebook did ask CA to delete the data as soon as they knew about the sale. I can’t imagine that Kogan didn’t hear about that. On that, I wouldn’t be able to say anything more relevant than the last sentence of the podcast on “creating your own reality”.

Kogan’s avoiding public opinion and his self-excuses are blocking the entire research on social networks. Now, Facebook PR expects that any similar academic collaboration will end badly — and I’m not surprised that those are stalled.

That is indeed a very interesting perspective