Social media is the string that connects the world. But what happens when the social media platforms just go off out of the blue? We all witnessed a social media outage on 5th October. 2021 which conspicuously impacted all of us. The outage lasted for approximately six hours, leaving Mark Zuckerberg at a huge loss.
Zuckerberg claimed that the vastly used social media platforms – WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram went down because of some faulty configuration on its routers. The engineers kept working on the mishap for hours and took a long time to fix the problem because of the extra security walls.
It was this day when a Facebook whistleblower went before the lawmakers arising momentum to regulate the social media giant. The whistleblower, Frances Haugen gave testimony against the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and laid in front of the world information about how the platform harms its users.
Ms. Haugen, who has worked previously with renowned companies like Google and Pinterest, stood firmly at Capitol Hill telling how the situation at Facebook is way worse than anything she has ever come across. She went on and leaked internal research to the authorities.
She talked about how Facebook hides a lot of information from its users. According to her, only the people working on Facebook know what is going on there and no one from outside can access even a little academic information.
It is an uphill task to even get a little information about the working of the company for academic purposes. In her words- "I believe that Facebook's products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy".
She mentioned how these social media platforms are doing harm to children in their teenage years and leading them into a distorted state of mental health. She said it is a metrics-driven organization that relies only on a few big players and is now leading to repercussions.
She laid stress on the fact that the social media giant focuses only on profits and is "morally bankrupt". She generalized facebook's loopholes and went on saying that it normally harms its users.
She noted how it is tremendously dangerous to hand in excessive power in hands of a service that a vast majority of people are habitual of taking their daily dose of entertainment and knowledge on. Her words also included that Facebook puts "astronomical profits before people".
It is this mindset that is affecting its users in a crystal clear manner. The algorithms are designed, are more inclined towards generating profits and monetary benefits instead of being user friendly.
Ms. Haugen also raised national-security concerns and threats to democracy that Facebook might lead to, citing foreign surveillance on the platform. Drug traffickers and people involved in illegal affairs can communicate easily through these platforms, delving the country into a crisis.
What Motivated Her?
Ms. Haugen had reasons to go ahead with testifying against the company. She claims that she knew her time at the company had to come to an end when her group- 'the civic integrity group' was broken apart.
The civic integrity group was a group of professionals who had made sacrifices for keeping democracy safe but Facebook broke it. Facebook's claim on this was they just distributed their employees in different areas.
She was also emotionally motivated by emotion and pain. She was deeply concerned about the long-term effects on young women. She said that women rely hugely on social media platforms, which is why there might be women walking with brittle bones in sixty years from now only because of the choices that Facebook made today based totally on profits.
Facebook's Defense
The chairman of the subcommittee conducting Tuesday's hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, called on Mr. Zuckerberg to testify before Congress. He responded by saying – "it doesn't reflect the company we know".
They said that Ms. Haugen had worked for a little less than 2 years with Facebook and she was not completely aware of Facebook and its policies. He said he was concerned more about the inconvenience of the people that rely on these services to communicate with people they love than about how many people switched to competitive platforms.
He said if there existed a way to completely solve this problem, they would have done that and a lot of claims that have been put upon the company do not even make sense.
He mentioned that they did not care about the mental health of people, they would not have dedicated so many people to battle against the harmful content on social media that is circulating now and then. They also have established an entire industry for maintaining transparency with the users and reporting what they are doing.
Regulations Suggested
Ms. Haugen suggested a few regulations which if taken into consideration can bring groundbreaking laws and change a lot. She asked for a change in Section 230, a law that protects Facebook and other companies from liability for user-generated content.
They should focus on what kind of content the user wants in their feed instead of what the company wants to show them. She stressed the need for transparency and open research to public scrutiny.
More broad access to data should be provided. One thing that must be taken into consideration is that Facebook should cease pondering over-regulating content, it should lay stress on regulating the algorithms instead.
Written by – Prachi Madnani
Edited by - Piyush Pandey
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