By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — For millions of people around the world, Facebook is simply another toy on the internet.

Many people simply log in now and then and scan what’s on the home page news feed on their smart phones, maybe hit like on a post or video, and don’t engage on news or political issues. Many simply set up a page for public relations purposes and never looked at it again, giving Facebook bragging rights about the number of people on its platform — and hackers an easy opening.

As one of our readers suggested hours after the platform came back online after being down for most of the day on Monday, “FB is a free and tasty snack that we all enjoy.”

But that’s only part of how the company sees itself. All that snacking gives them very personal information about people, which they turn around and use to convince advertisers to spend millions targeting them with ad messages.

And it’s not how millions of other people saw it when they suddenly discovered that they were not able to sign in to smart devices in their own homes, to change the setting on the thermostat, for instance, or sign into their smart TVs or go online to order groceries.

They couldn’t access FB Messenger either, which many people now use instead of other email programs. Students couldn’t contact their parents, and parents were locked out of contacting their children. Others must have access to Facebook and the related program WhatsApp to sign into Zoom to do their remote work jobs or get in touch with their doctor or psychiatrist.

In some countries, such as Myanmar and India, Facebook is synonymous with the internet.

More than 3.5 billion people around the world use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp to communicate with friends and family, distribute political messaging, and expand their businesses through advertising and outreach, for example.

The New York Times called the outage “far-reaching and severe.”

“Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, were inaccessible for hours on Monday, taking out a vital communications platform used by billions and showcasing just how dependent the world has become on a company that is under intense scrutiny,” the Times reported.

Facebook Whistleblower

In a bit of irony, the shutdown came the day after a former employee turned whistle-blower and was publicly identified talked about the problems at Facebook on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” and the day after the blackout, testified before a Congressional committee about the inner workings of the world’s largest social network. This was treated as a conspiracy theory by some on Twitter.

In more than three hours of testimony before a Senate subcommittee, Frances Haugen, who worked on Facebook’s civic misinformation team for nearly two years until May, detailed how the company was deliberate in its efforts to keep people — including children — hooked to its service. She seemed to speak candidly and with a level of insight the company’s executives have never provided.

Haugen said Facebook had purposely hidden disturbing research showing that Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and others in management knew their platform was sowing political division and spreading hate speech, that they knew something about how to potentially fix it, and failed to act because they wanted all those users engaged and coming back. Millions in ad revenue was at stake, as well as the stock valuation.

She also gave members of Congress information on what other data they should ask Facebook for, which could lead to proposals to regulate the Silicon Valley tech giant as it increasingly faces questions about its global reach and power.

“I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” Haugen testified. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won’t make the necessary changes.”

Frances Haugen Opening Statement

Facebook Whistle-Blower Urges Lawmakers to Regulate the Company

Haugen’s testimony, and the thousands of pages of documents she had gathered from the company and then leaked to the conservative Wall Street Journal and a conservative Republican Senator from Tennessee, showed that Facebook’s top executives had misled the public and could not be trusted.

“This research is the definition of a bombshell,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, who led the hearing.

Haugen’s testimony to the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection capped several intense weeks of scrutiny for Facebook after she leaked thousands of pages of internal documents to The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper’s coverage last month set off one of Facebook’s worst public relations crises since a data privacy scandal in 2018 with the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

“I think the time has come for action, and I think you are the catalyst for that action,” Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar told Haugen during the hearing.

Blackout

It is unknown whether Facebook was hacked on Monday, intentionally taken down to delete damning content, or was simply an accidental data transfer error, as the company later claimed.

Facebook’s apps began displaying error messages around 11:40 a.m. Eastern time. Then, Facebook literally disappeared from the web. The outage lasted more than five hours, before some apps slowly flickered back to life, though the company cautioned the services would take time to stabilize.

Late Monday, and not in a very public way, Facebook claimed changes to its underlying internet infrastructure that coordinates the traffic between its data centers caused the problem. That interrupted communications and cascaded to other data centers, “bringing our services to a halt,” the company said in a statement.

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear that there was no malicious activity behind this outage — its root cause was a faulty configuration change on our end. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime. (Updated on Oct. 5, 2021, to reflect the latest information)”

Facebook eventually restored service allegedly after a team got access to its server computers at a data center in Santa Clara, Calif. and reset them, sources said.

Congress

Senators seemed to be in broad agreement during the hearing about the need to hold Facebook accountable somehow, bringing up a variety of legislative proposals, including bills that would force companies like Facebook to provide more transparency on the spread of misinformation and other harmful content.

But the senators didn’t provide a clear path for addressing the many problems raised by Haugen’s testimony or the documents she leaked. Dozens of bills on data privacy and changes to speech laws have stalled in Congress. House lawmakers approved a series of bills meant to strengthen antitrust laws this year, but the full House has not taken up the legislation, and its prospects in the Senate appear dim, according to reporting by The New York Times.

Haugen suggested legislation that would force companies like Facebook to open their systems to researchers to study the prevalence of hate speech and other harmful content.

“We can afford nothing less than full transparency,” Haugen said, adding that she did not believe antitrust action to break up Facebook would address core problems in the business model. “Left alone, Facebook will continue to make choices that go against the common good.”

Senators asked how Facebook had amplified dangerous speech leading to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, how misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines spread on its services, and how false information contributed to ethnic violence in Ethiopia and Myanmar.

Haugen gave detailed answers and repeatedly said executives knew more about the problems than they were admitting publicly.

She also offered technological expertise on the technology behind the company’s services. She talked about the dangers in the way that Facebook gives priority to posts based on how many likes, shares and comments they generate — engagement that often occurs with false, divisive and agitating content. She contrasted it with iMessage, Apple’s text-messaging platform, which ranks messages in the order in which they arrived.

In addition to promoting harmful, hyper-engaging content in the United States, Facebook’s engagement-based ranking system is “literally fanning ethnic violence” in places like Ethiopia, she said.

Haugen also criticized Facebook’s focus on technology tools to detect vaccine and other misinformation. Facebook is “overly reliant on artificial intelligence systems that they themselves say will likely never get more than 10 to 20 percent of the content,” she said.

At Facebook, Haugen said, she noticed a pattern of the company’s choosing to ignore warnings of harm done by its service. The final straw came in December when the company disbanded her group that was charged with stopping the spread of misinformation.

“It really felt like a betrayal,” Haugen said.

In addition to sharing the documents with members of Congress and The Journal, Haugen sent some to the offices of at least five state attorneys general and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Lawyers at Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit law group that represents Haugen, have pressed the SEC to open an investigation that Facebook withheld evidence that would affect its financial performance.

Bottom Line

Much has been written over the past few years about the problems for democracy Facebook has created by stealing much of the ad revenue that supported the news business in America, and the problems it has created in fomenting political division by helping in the spread of misinformation and disinformation.

A search of the New American Journal turns up 469 search results for “facebook”: https://www.newamericanjournal.net/?s=facebook

We have written about it extensively, even in evolutionary terms about the problem of working to save American democracy and to work to #KeepLifeLivable on planet Earth.

A number of people have paid attention to those messages, shared them and supported this work financially. But it has not taken hold all over the country and the world yet, probably because so many people just consider Facebook a harmless toy.

If there are smart, educated, rich, powerful people now ready to pay attention and help, this is a good place to start your reading. Turn off cable TeeVee, shut down Facebook, and take the time to read this.

It’s not just about tweaking Facebook a little. It’s doubtful Facebook can be fixed. The same with Google. Our entire information system needs an overhaul.