October 2021: Facebook’s Platform Challenges

Now is the time for Social Media Platform Service Providers to focus on Safety, but today is a banner bad day for the Facebook Incorporated business, first with the charges by Whistleblower, and former Facebook Data Scientist, Frances Haugen which had already impacted Facebook Stock which is down – Nasdaq -16.78 (-4.892%)

The present challenge all service providers in this space face is profitability versus social responsibility. Engagement makes a social platform hum, so it is important to remember that corporations that offer free social media, thrive on engagement. They make money on engagement.

Monday morning October 4, 2021 in California, Facebook Inc experienced widespread Global outages across their platform, all Facebook Products and internal products. Facebook (+127K Users), Instagram (+99K users), and WhatsApp (+35K users) went down today.

This outage represents so far the largest outage since 2008, when Facebook was down for one day affecting 80Million users. Today’s outage so far has been down for over 4 hours and the platform affects 3Billion users, all Facebook Products, most regions, and internal and external applications. It is unclear how many users, or geographic areas, are currently impacted, nor is it presently known what has caused the outage that impacted 3 of Facebook’s leading applications to go down.

There was no evidence as of Monday afternoon that malicious activity was involved. Matthew Prince, CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, tweeted that “nothing we’re seeing related to the Facebook services outage suggests it was an attack.” Prince said the most likely explanation was that Facebook mistakenly knocked itself off the internet during maintenance.

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram services gradually return following worldwide outage (news12.com)

Facebook Whistleblower: Frances Haugen

Social Network Subject Matter Expert, Frances Haugen is a Data Scientist from Iowa. Frances Haugen was intereviewed on 60 Minutes discussing allegations that Facebook has been deceiving investors about how it has been dealing with hate speech and misinformation on its platform. You can not manage what you can not measure. Facebook has created both an Artificial Intelligence Driven algorithm and Metrics to measure and trend hate speech and misinformation.

Despite being the best in the world at measuring and detecting algorithms and managing hate speech and misinformation, Facebook’s view of the metrics, and “actions’ as a result of the metrics are out of synch, and the impact is personal:

• less than 3-5% of destructive hate speech
• less than .6% of violence and incitement

Examples of Facebook Allowed Incitement of Violence

Facebooks mission is to connect people all around the world. They changed their algorithm in 2018 to promote “what it calls meaningful social interactions” through “engagement-based rankings.” Content that gets greater engagement reactions, comments, and shares – gets wider distribution. Disinformation and misinformation has taken brand new accounts and follow Donald Trump, Fox News, etc. The just clicking the top links in those areas bring “Qanon”, group suggestions and interactions that drive reactions and like engagement. Facebook models base upon what you click. The more angry you are, the more likely you are to get more distribution.

What are some examples of Facebook Allowed Incitement of Violence?

• In 2018, Myanmar Military used Facebook to launch a genocide
• In 2020, Militia Groups inciting racial violence
• In 2021, Facebook allegedly flamed the social fires of the Capitol riot

Dawn C Simmons LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest – CxO Leader

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