Shut down of FB, Instagram and WhatsApp – Another scandal?

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Early in the afternoon today, 4th of October, I opened Instagram and it showed that there are some connections errors. Later in a while, I was told that not only Instagram but also Facebook and WhatsApp are not available for use. After searching online, some news related to the whistleblower – Frances Haugen popped up. 

Frances Haugen, who was a product manager at Facebook, who took an interview on the 3rd of October, said that Facebook chose to optimize its own profit instead of the public good (Horwitz, 2021). She also said that Facebook was tearing society apart with enormous bad things in it such as hate speech and misinformation (Pelley, 2021). According to Yahoo finance (2021), On the first of October, the stock price of Facebook was $343,01, on the 4th, the stock price went down to $326,23.

Previously, there were also some Facebook scandals. For example, it is reported that Facebook collected information from up to 87 million people and other companies can also access to personal data of Facebook users (Sanders, 2019). According to estimation, Facebook has 1,9 billion daily active users on average, with growth of 6,89% year over year (Dean, 2021). Hence, thanks to the enormous amount of users who use Facebook, Facebook can benefit from the network effect, which means that from the perspective of advertisers, Facebook becomes more valuable when there are more people using it and Facebook gains large amounts of profit from advertisers. In 2020, 84,2 billion dollars of revenue was generated from the worldwide advertising of Facebook (Statista, 2021). However, there are always some discussions about whether Facebook monetizes the data collected from users by directly selling them. In fact, Facebook does not sell data, it sells access to users by doing things such as putting an advertisement in users’ News Feed (Wagner, 2018).

The news of Frances Haugen reveals a new scandal of Facebook and also brings us concerns: How should we deal with the tech giants or social media platforms with their increasing influence on society? Perhaps by imposing more strict censorship? Then what about the freedom of speech? Or by posting more regulations for the usage of data? There are many things that need to be considered. And we will first see how Facebook will act on this scandal.

References

Dean, B. (2021). How Many People Use Facebook In 2021? [online] Backlinko. Available at: https://backlinko.com/facebook-users.

finance.yahoo.com. (2021). Facebook, Inc. (FB) Stock Historical Prices & Data – Yahoo Finance. [online] Available at: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB/history?p=FB.

Horwitz, J. (2021). The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Says She Wants to Fix the Company, Not Harm It. Wall Street Journal. [online] 3 Oct. Available at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122 [Accessed 4 Oct. 2021].

Pelley, S. (2021). Whistleblower: Facebook is misleading the public on progress against hate speech, violence, misinformation. [online] www.cbsnews.com. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-misinformation-public-60-minutes-2021-10-03/.

Sanders, J. (2019). Facebook data privacy scandal: A cheat sheet. [online] TechRepublic. Available at: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/facebook-data-privacy-scandal-a-cheat-sheet/.

Statista. (2021). Facebook ad revenue 2009-2020. [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271258/facebooks-advertising-revenue-worldwide/.

Wagner, K. (2018). Facebook ads: This is how the company uses your data for targeting. [online] Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17177842/facebook-advertising-ads-explained-mark-zuckerberg.