Facebook promotions on Monday, 4 October, fell on 5% after the longest failure in 13 years. And a day earlier, a former employee of the company accused the social network of an unfair fight against misinformation..
Stirs up hatred and traumatizes teenagers
Former Facebook manager Francis Haugen told ViacomCBS, that the information policy of the company amplifies the contention in the network. According to Haugen, After Biden's victory over Trump in the presidential election, Facebook prematurely turned off information filters. Hate speech posted online, which led to a mob invasion of the Capitol in early January. Such posts attract users and help to place more digital advertising..
“On Facebook, I constantly observed a conflict of interest: choose then, what is good for society, or then, what is good for the company. And each time Facebook pursued its own interests, to make more money ", Haugen said..
Previously, Facebook conducted its internal research and concluded: social media algorithms fuel political discord, and also lead to psychological disorders of adolescents. According to the company, a third of teenage girls feel worse, when looking at other people's photos on Instagram. Haugen copied research data, and later submitted them to the Wall Street Journal.
Biggest crash since 2008
On Monday, the main services of Facebook became unavailable, including Instagram and WhatsApp. The company's internal systems also failed., email was the only communication channel.. Facebook was unable to solve the problem remotely and sent engineers to restart the servers in the data center. Social network restored work after six hours. The company does not disclose the reasons for the malfunction..
Facebook's last major outage happened in 2008., when the social network remained unavailable all day. Then the service was used by about 80 million people. Today, Facebook has 3 billion users..
Shares of other social media and big tech companies also fell on Monday.. Twitter shares fell by 5,8%, Pinterest — на 5,7%, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet - 2-3%. Technological index Nasdaq Composite fell by 2,1% per day and for 7% from the high in early September.
