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Evening Standard comment: What were Brexit’s links to Facebook data?

Facebook needs fixing. Even Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, agrees: he used his New Year message to promise action

But his job has just got a lot harder with reports that a firm with links to Britain, Cambridge Analytica, may have misused personal data to help drive the election of President Trump.

“We currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools,” Mr Zuckerberg told users.

So what’s his answer? He needs one — fast. Facebook started out as an insurgent tech teenager busting rules but it has become a multi-billion user global business with more clout than any other media organisation on the planet.

A grown-up company should behave in a grown-up way but as the Cambridge Analytica story shows that isn’t happening.

It is not enough to expect users to realise what they are letting themselves in for when they sign up: which anyway, for most, will not have included a bit part in the making of President Trump.

But if the digital “Wild West” described today by the Culture Secretary, Matt Hancock, was part of America’s election upset, what about closer to home?

After all, Brexit campaigners were not shy of boasting about their digital genius when they won the referendum — and part of that is said to have included working with Cambridge Analytica.

So will those same campaigners come forward now to explain what went on, in the face of serious questions about the way data from Facebook has been collected, used and stored in elections?

“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons,” says Christopher Wylie, who developed its software.

“That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

Manipulation like this doesn’t sit easily with the Brexit campaign’s promise to give control back to the people.

Of course it’s true that digital campaigning is an essential and sometimes healthy part of modern democracy. But those who undertake it should explain themselves to voters.

We need to know exactly what went on between the Brexiteers and Cambridge Analytica. Whose data was used, how and what were the consequences?

If campaigners won’t tell us, and government won’t act, then Parliament must step forward and find out.

London’s $1m teacher

Congratulations to Andria Zafirakou, the London teacher who has just been chosen as the best teacher in the world — winning a global prize and the $1 million that comes with it.

The Varkey Foundation, the education charity that sponsors the prize, want to celebrate the best teachers with all the showbiz and glitz of an Oscar-style event.

That they did last night, with Lewis Hamilton handing Ms Zafirakou her Global Teacher prize as Jennifer Hudson got ready to sing her success.

She was chosen from 30,000 teachers around the world who teach in schools ranging from the slums of Brazil to the rural villages of the Philippines.

Ms Zafirakou teaches arts and textiles in Alperton community schools in Brent, where the pupils collectively speak a staggering 35 different languages.

In her assured acceptance speech, Ms Zafirakou explained how she and fellow teachers redesigned the curriculum so that it felt relevant to their disadvantaged and isolated pupils, and brought them together as one school.

It’s a celebration of the contribution of immigrants to our country and a model for integration that could be followed elsewhere.

Ms Zafirakou also spoke passionately for the arts to be at the core of what schools teach.

The push to get more children studying maths and engineering may intuitively feel like the right response to the internet age.

But as our columnist Rohan Silva wrote here last week, in the world of the robot and artificial intelligence, we want the next generation to have the skills that machines cannot replicate — not the ones they can.

The arts are a way we as human society interpret our past and try to understand the present.

Ms Zafirakou has reminded us they also the key to all of our futures.