Facebook has received a lot of bad publicity in the last week. Almost everybody is aware of the huge outage that affected Facebook and its subsidiaries, which made it impossible for consumers to use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. This is ofcourse a big problem and shows how reliable we are on a few companies to communicate with each other. However, this outage took the spotlight from much bigger problems with the platform that were revealed a couple of days earlier.
On Sunday, the identity of a whistleblower was revealed on the TV show “60 Minutes”. Frances Haugen started her job at Facebook in the civic integrity team. However, as time went on and this team got dissolved, Haugen became more and more disenchanted by the company. At some point during this year, she realized that the company prioritized its profits over the wellbeing of its users. She gathered thousands of documents and left the company (Duffy, 2021).
But what where the issues that made Haugen leave Facebook?
It has been shown that the use of social media can have negative effects on its users, like increased stress or anxiety (Brown, 2018). Haugen, however, revealed that Facebook knew of some of these negative effects and chose growth instead of fixing these issues. Two instances can be identified from the leaked documents. According to Haugen, Facebook knew from research that using Instagram could have a negative effect on the mental health of teenage girls and that it helps to create a divide in society (Eijsvoogel, 2021). The company chooses to ignore these problems and by doing so creating a worse society for us to live in.
Luckily, this problem is getting more attention in recent times. Haugen even appeared in front of the United States congress and lawmakers all over the world want to control (the seemingly endless) power of social media companies like Facebook. I would love to hear what you think about this issue! Should the government set stricter laws to try and limit the harm of social media or is this the responsibility of the users and not the company that provides the platform?
References:
Brown, J. (2018, January 4). Is social media bad for you? The evidence and the unknowns. Bbc.com; BBC Future. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180104-is-social-media-bad-for-you-the-evidence-and-the-unknowns
Duffy, C. (2021, October 4). Facebook whistleblower revealed on ’60 Minutes,’ says the company prioritized profit over public good. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/03/tech/facebook-whistleblower-60-minutes/index.html
Eijsvoogel, J. (2021, October 5). Deze vrouw wil aan het licht brengen hoe gevaarlijk Facebook is. NRC. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/10/05/de-vrouw-die-facebook-in-t-nauw-bracht-a4060808
Very relevant content, important to write about this topic.
Probably alot of people have seen posts on social media leaving one with envy and wondering if other peoples lifes are better than once owns.
However, one realizes that people on social media tend to show the “good side” of their lifes to present themselfes in another, better light.
I can imagine that seeing such things is very unhealthy for younger people. They are still in a phase of finding themselves and question alot of things in life. Being constantly exposed to unrealistic standards can affect many areas of tennager’s lifes. Such as stress to conform to social media’s beauty standards, otherwise facing e.g. cyber bullying to name one (Very Well Family, 2021). This is of course not only the case for younger generations but for adults, that are exposed to the presentation of success of others, might be vulnerable aswell.
It is actually terrible to hear that facebook actively “sweeps” such matters “under the rug” (But also not that suprising to be honest). It should be important to educate people on such matters, to not have them feel like they are at risk when not conforming to trends to impress their peers. In addition, governments should be more strict with such matters.
But how could they do that ? Do you think there could be a sort of measurement to penalize the negative impact on e.g. teens ? To limit the harm, it would first need to be understood what exactly the damage is, maybe even on the individual level. I can only imagine how difficult that would be.
What came to my mind at the end of writing this comment is that it may be more easy to measure physical health and set regulations on e.g. junk food, while measuring psychological health and seting regulations on social media seems more difficult. This may be due to the immaterial nature of digital content.