Do we really want to live in the future Facebook is building?
Al Jazeera
The Facebook outage and revelations should be a wake-up call not just for the US but the rest of the world as well.
It has been a difficult week for Facebook. On Monday, its family of companies – including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Oculus – suffered their largest service interruption to date. For six hours all of the platforms were offline because a routine maintenance process went awry. Billions of users were unable to access their services while company staffers were virtually and physically locked out of the systems they needed to fix the issue.
Then on Tuesday, former Facebook employee and whistle-blower Frances Haugen testified before the United States Congress that the company deliberately puts profit over protecting people by allowing harm to children particularly, and democracy more broadly. Despite efforts from Facebook to counter Haugen’s testimony on various outlets, her account was devastating for the company and came as Congress is deliberating the chance of some kind of legal or political action against the company.
On the same day that Haugen was testifying, the world received an inadvertent reminder of why this was an urgent issue.
