Since early last week, the social media behemoth Facebook has been hit hard by a series of revelations that the private date of more than 50 million users was made available to Cambridge Analytica, and the data mining firm used that private details to manipulate voting intentions in several countries.

The scale of the data mining operation has provided ample grist for the editorial mills of newspapers the world over, with the Irish Times noting: “The revelation that an estimated 50 million Facebook user profiles... will come as a shock but not a surprise to many.” And it added: “The people whose job is to protect the user always are fighting an uphill battle against the people whose job is to make money for the company.” It noted President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon claimed that by combining social media data with psychological profiling it could deliver powerful political messages tailored to specific personality types.

“While some experts have contested the accuracy of some of these claims, and it is not possible to measure what effect, if any, these tactics had on the outcome of either the US election or the UK referendum, there is no doubt they speak to our darkest Orwellian fears of how digital media has been weaponised to undermine democracy and manipulate public opinion.”

That’s a theme that was also picked up by the editorial writers of the New York Times.

“What is particularly disturbing about this case is that Facebook has not yet identified and alerted users whose profile information was vacuumed up by the app, most of whom had never used it but were friends with somebody else who had,” it opined. And it noted that Facebook’s response was “reminiscent of its slow, defensive reaction to the spread of pro-Trump fake news on its platform during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

It also reflects on the potential fallout of Cambridge Analytica’s intervention in the 2016 president election. “The company has offered contradictory statements about its use of what’s called “psychographic data” for the campaign, which included targeting political messages to voters receptive to them. The trove contained enough details about roughly 30 million people, including where they lived, that the company was able to build detailed profiles by linking the data to other sources of information.”

The influential Handelsbatt newspaper in Germany offered measures that should prevent data-mining companies and Facebook from interfering in its political processes.

“First, regulations should make ‘unattributable and untraceable ads’ illegal. Social-media companies such as Facebook should be required by law to clearly mark political ads and also to publish information about who paid for the ad, how much was spent and what targeting parameters were used,” it observes. “There should also be a central, easily searchable repository for all online political ads placed.”

With typical German efficiency, it also recommends that new regulations should also address parties and political campaign organisations. “We currently have clear transparency and disclosure rules on funding. In addition, parties and campaigns get audited for their use of funds. It is clear that for parties and campaigns, data for targeted advertising has become almost as important as money — and is bound to become more important in the future. So parties and campaigning organisations should be required to disclose the sources of data they use and the targeted advertising campaigns they run.”

The editorial writers of Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, however, took a far more caustic view, advising its readers: “If you’re not paying for something, you are the product.”