Week 6 News – A Bad Week for Facebook

Facebook Whistleblower testifies before Congress

Facebook has recently been in the news as a cache of internal documents has been leaked to the media showing that their own internal research indicated issues created by their platforms, especially the effects on the self-esteem of younger users on platforms such as Instagram. This has led to a series of Congressional hearings, culminating this Tuesday in the testimony of a former Facebook project manager, Frances Haugen, who also appeared on 60 Minutes this Sunday and revealed herself to be the source of the documents.

While last week’s grilling of Facebook representatives only grabbed national attention over confusion of whether “finsta” is a service or not, Tuesday’s testimony was incredibly rough for Facebook. Haugen laid out an articulate picture for Senators of what she saw as the ongoing issues with the massive platform, but also argued that breaking up the company would be less effective than implementing stronger regulatory oversight, especially for algorithms and AI.

There was significant interest expressed from nearly every member of the Senate Committee, suggesting that Facebook may not have friends on either side of the aisle when it comes to this issue.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/15/22675130/facebook-instagram-teens-mental-health-damage-internal-research

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/5/22710539/facebook-whistleblower-hearing-instagram-child-safety-congress

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-misinformation-public-60-minutes-2021-10-03/

Facebook goes down at the worst time, and takes a lot of the internet with it…

On Monday, as the news cycle was covering Sunday night’s interview and Congress was preparing to hear testimony about the potential harm of the platform, Facebook services went offline, taking related services including Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and Oculus with it. The company has categorized the issues as a “maintenance error”, indicating that a misconfiguration of network connections between data centers, or possibly a DNS issue cased the cascading failure. The worldwide outage lasted for nearly 7 hours, and services were slow to come back online.

Many other services that rely on Facebook as a third-party for account authorization also were also affected during the outage, locking people out of those accounts. Some Facebook employees were even locked out of their offices.

The timing could hardly be worse for Facebook, as pressure has been growing on Capitol Hill to regulate or even break-up large tech companies. This event put a spotlight on just how centralized a Facebook account has become to the infrastructure of worldwide communications, and how precarious that infrastructure might actually be.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-down.html

Facebook / Zuckerberg Respond

Members of Facebook’s leadership team were notably absent from last week’s testimony, opting instead to send members of their “Strategic Response” team to testify instead. The New York Times has reported that this was a deliberate choice to keep CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg away from the hearings.

This absence was noted by Senators, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who said “Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror today, and yet, rather than taking responsibility and showing leadership, Mr. Zuckerberg is going sailing,”  (a reference to the optics of an Instagram video that Zuckerberg posted of himself sailing just before the 60 Minutes segment was about to air).

Facebook initially responded to the hearings with a statement that said they disagreed the Haugen’s characterization (though did not say how or offer evidence of why) and made a point to suggest that suggest that she was not senior enough in the company to be able to speak to such issues.

Perhaps feeling some internal pressure, Zuckerberg released a statement to Facebook staffers late Tuesday. In it, he does not mention Haugen by name, but instead argues that it would be “illogical” to “set out to build a platform that makes people angry or depressed”. (While this is likely true, it could also be argued that anger and depression may be possible side effects of the methods that companies might employ or exploit – think “dark patterns” and “addiction” – in order to reach their actual goal of optimized profits. )

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/congress-demands-mark-zuckerberg-answer-questions-at-haugen-hearing.html

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/5/22711182/facebook-whistleblower-smear-pr-response

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/5/22711837/mark-zuckerberg-responds-to-facebook-whistleblower

Another SEC investigation?

And just like Activision/Blizzard last week, Facebook may now also be facing additional scrutiny by the SEC due to eight complaints filed by Haugen, including that the company was aware that their platform was being used to promote human trafficking.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-sec-complaint-60-minutes-2021-10-04/