Facebook’s Six-Hour Shutdown
On Oct. 3, former Facebook data scientist Frances Hugen released findings about Facebook in a live interview with Columbia Broadcasting News (CBS) that the social media platform is generating content about suicide and inappropriate body image to its users’ feeds. Following Hugen’s allegations, Facebook shut down its services the next day along with their other social media platforms, Instagram and Whatsapp, for over six hours, leaving the public confused.
After releasing this information about Facebook’s algorithm, Hugen stepped down from her position to make a public statement on the company’s actions. One of Hugen’s claims expressed her belief that Facebook was used to organize the riot in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Though many Trump supporters were using the phrase “stop the steal”, Facebook never took down or investigated the posts that included this phrase, despite its violation of public safety guidelines. In addition to this issue, Hugen claims that Facebook and Instagram purposely display posts about harmful body images, suicidal thoughts and stress issues, which endangers the younger audiences on the platform (CBS). These targeted advertisements may suggest posts about dieting to achieve an ideal body, which can lead to many teenagers feeling insecure. Content that involves suicide, could in turn damage many users’ mental health, was also allowed on both Facebook and Instagram apps. Freshman Sarah Choi has seen these kinds of advertisements and wishes the apps’ coders would limit them in order to protect younger users that could be influenced by its message.
“Instagram does help us communicate [with others digitally], but it also makes us try and compare our lives to the people we see on social media,” Choi said. “Possible limits or filters [that control the content]everyone has to see on their pages [would be one aspect I would like to change about social media].”
Since 2008, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have not shut down their services, which has caused social media users to question the cause for the company’s recent shutdown. Santhosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president, stated that “the platforms went down due to configuration changes on the backbone routers,” which caused issues with the servers. Cyber experts believe that the problem was with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is a type of routing protocol for the Internet to exchange routing information with other systems. Other social media platforms also require the use of a BGP in their system. Though researchers have said the shutdown was a technical failure, many users have called out Facebook for shutting down their apps intentionally due to Hugen’s claims and changing their algorithm during the downtime (Computer Network). Sophomore Vayuna Pradhan uses Facebook and believes that this new controversy behind its shutdown will affect the app’s usership negatively.
“[The whistleblower’s revelation] is not good for Facebook’s reputation,” Pradhan said. “Lots of friends and family have said they started using Facebook because of the positive aspects like connecting with new people, and this issue of sharing certain types of feeds can decrease the amount of Facebook users.”
Regardless of the cause, many teenagers who could not access their accounts used this opportunity to reflect on their social media usage. Some rediscovered old hobbies, while others took the time to be extra productive with their school work. Junior Caroline Becker used the shutdown time to find new things to do, and chose to read and stay productive with schoolwork.
“I forced myself to read and do my homework instead of being on social media,” Becker said. “I usually do not read as much as I used to, so I took this as an opportunity to do another [productive] activity.”
The Facebook shutdown caused both harm and good. While the release of the statement of Hugen made users angry with Facebook and its other owned social media apps they own, many teenagers were able to take the time to reflect on social media’s uses and potentially dangerous content while finding hobbies to spend time learning
