Beyond 2018
Protests
The gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement has transformed from being a protest against French President Emmanuel Macron's new eco-tax on fuel to a national protest against Macron. The movement has also spread to other European countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands.
? Expert: Cui Hongjian, director of the Department for European Studies at the China Institute of International Studies
The spread of the yellow vest protests is symptomatic of the social conflict in Europe as people are disappointed about the declining living standards and ineffective governance.
But the problem in France is more severe because people had high expectations of President Emmanuel Macron, as the leader of a new party, but his party cannot reform the traditional political system in a short time. What's more, Macron launched sweeping reform in a rush and the reforms have not met people's needs.
The gilets jaunes protests are having a great impact on Macron's presidency, and will affect the implementation of his policies in the future, France's political environment and even the power of his party in the European Parliament.
The gilets jaunes movement has close relations with the rising populism in Europe but cannot be regarded as a populist movement. And in the time of the internet, it is natural for such a movement to spread. Furthermore, after decades of prosperity and population mobility, the troubles of integration have appeared in the European Union, creating political instability.
Facebook
In March, Cambridge Analytica, a data mining, brokerage and analysis company, was reported to have obtained personal information of about 50 million Facebook users. Facebook stock prices fell sharply and the company was fined 1.63 billion euros by the European Union for data breach.
? Expert: Lu Chuanying, an associate researcher at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies
Facebook provides a platform for users to interact with each other, and its size and influence depend on the number of its users.
But as its size and influence have grown, the personal information of the billions of people it collects also poses a huge risk to both the company and its users. Should personal data be leaked, the company will have to pay huge amounts of compensation to users whose privacy is violated.
In some experiments, data companies reportedly managed to outline a person's daily life by collecting their personal data from social media. Leaks of such personal data may cause a loss that no money can compensate. Even for a government, the database of big platforms such as Facebook is important because a leak could threaten national security. In the case of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica analyzed the impact of personal information on the US presidential election, implying that it posed a potential challenge to the state.
So a government has to perform the role of night watchman well.
It's time the authorities regulated such companies strictly. We hope the Facebook case will prompt similar companies to strengthen their efforts to prevent data they collect from being leaked.
