Issue of the week: Facebook under scrutiny
A massive outage failed to sink Facebook, but could a whistleblower prove more effective?
“Facebook basically locked its keys in its car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard professor of internet law, on Monday. It was one of the kinder summaries of “the worst disruption to hit the social networking firm” for years, said the Financial Times. The six-hour outage – which cut off access globally to platforms including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – “brought a wave of criticism” and wiped nearly $50bn off the company’s share price. Facebook blamed “a faulty configuration change” on its routers. But opponents were quick to make hay. Twitter boss Jack Dorsey “joined in the social media backlash against Facebook”, urging followers to switch to rival messaging services such as Signal and Telegram. Politicians were also quick to jump on the bandwagon. Arguing that the massive outage highlighted the risks of Facebook’s “monopoly”, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeated calls for the company’s break-up.
The protracted outage was merely “the latest in a cascade of difficult events” for Facebook, said Kurt Wagner on Bloomberg. The day before the debacle, a former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes to accuse the company “of prioritising profits over user safety”. She claims that it has chosen not to fix problems; for instance it keeps users engaged by making them angry and hostile. Haugen has leaked “thousands of damning documents” to US lawmakers and The Wall Street Journal, exposing “Facebook’s struggles with content moderation, and Instagram’s negative psychological impact on teenagers”. Testifying in front of a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday, she declared that Facebook’s products “harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy”. The company’s leadership, she said, “keeps vital information from the public, the US government, its shareholders, and governments around the world”.
No wonder “Facebook is in hot water again”, said Lex in the FT. The social media giant says that the allegations are “misleading”, but they deliver another blow to its reputation, which has taken repeated hits since the Cambridge Analytica scandal three years ago. The truth is, though – as Facebook has “repeatedly proved” – these scandals “do little to deter users and advertisers”. The “profit machine keeps humming”, agreed Gina Chon on Reuters Breakingviews. But “politicians are on the alert”. If they cannot break up Facebook, they may find other ways to tame it – say, by putting “a cap on the company’s ability to sign up new users”. Even the threat of that “might get Big Tech to take its social impact more seriously”.