Earlier this week, Frances Haugen testified before the United States Senate Commerce Committee, a bipartisan group of lawmakers. During the session, the former Facebook employee expressed concerns that the tech company had internal knowledge that its algorithms were encouraging negative social patterns on its platforms, including bullying and eating disorders among teens. She added that Facebook has made political communication nastier in parts of Europe and fueled ethnic violence in Ethiopia.
Facebook is a goliath of an entity, and to meet someone who has not ever used the platform is rare. The company’s namesake began as a social networking platform for college students. At one time, you needed to add the name of your college in order to be admitted onto the platform. Back then, apps like the Honesty Box were popular. Facebook also owns Instagram, the platform that revolutionized the modeling industry, creating a space for self-proclaimed Instagram models. Instagram has become an engine for creatives and small business owners to promote their products. Facebook also owns Whatsapp, the messaging platform that people across the world use to make phone calls, send photos and also audio. A government agency should exist to regulate how Facebook manages algorithms and data for all of these platforms, Haugen recommended during the testimony. But by the end of her session, she had admitted that it might be likely that the very conversation about regulation might be old by the next year, and that the tech giant might continue to function without oversight.
We’re in an era of mass information. The Internet has made communicating ideas much easier. You want to share a message? Start a Facebook page. Start an Instagram account. Or join a messaging platform like Whatsapp. But who sees those ideas and for how long depends upon the platforms and, to some extent, how much money users are willing to pay to promote their content. Facebook is considered, by some governmental entities, as a public utility. The question, here, is whether the company should be subject to the same criteria as other public utilities. As a publicly traded company, Facebook is required to disclose certain information to its investors. But there are limits on what that information may be. What was interesting about Haugen’s testimony is that she brought up high turnover within Facebook and the organization’s difficulties keeping up with the fast pace of its growth. What effect might a governmental regulatory agency have on the pace of the company’s growth and, furthermore, might Facebook be looking to acquire other platforms?
On Monday, October 4th, one day before Haugen’s testimony, there was a Facebook outage. That outage affected millions of users, including small business owners, public safety agencies, and journalists. The company lost revenue during the outage (figures vary). The event prompted many people to start accounts on another platform, Signal. The company tweeted, “Signups are way up on Signal (welcome everyone!) We also know what it’s like to work through an outage, and wish the best for the engineers working on bringing back service on other platforms #mondays.”
It’s hard to really tell what the impact of that outage was. Time will tell.
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