Why Facebook was Really Down

Preface: This article has nothing to do with any of my own personal opinions about literally anything other than governance.

Intro

Could it be that important people at Facebook realised after whistleblower Frances Haugen came forward earlier today how malicious and harmful the platform is to some of it’s users or is it actually just an attempt to cover up all of the things that would come to light as a result of future investigations?

My Perspective

From my perspective as a developer and someone who has closely followed Facebook for years, it seems that these are the two most plausible reasons for the major outages. The majority of Facebook’s original team have departed from it and it may be due to events like mobs killing people due to fake news (Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/nigeria_fake_news) However mobs have also killed people in the past due to mis-information spread by word of mouth. IE. Salem Witchcraft Trials. So should we really be blaming the platform and people who work in the company for things that happen in real life regardless? To me it’s evident that the platform kind of grew out of control and a lot of these problems can’t be solved for due to culture around money itself and not that there aren’t solutions.

Take political manipulation for example. It’s been happening since the beginning of time essentially whenever we developed human conversation. I don’t think we should blame the platform for this but we should blame the platform for making it more efficient. Because without social platforms, forum boards etc spreading Fake News requires significantly more risk and effort as it requires people communicating in person and so their identity is much more easily discovered this way. However stopping this from happening is akin to taking people’s rights away from them from the perspective of many people including myself depending on which solutions are used.

Solutions not Challenges

When these platforms etc are created, problems like fake news should be evident and there should be measures in place to stop the spread of information designed to destroy the life of users of it’s platforms in a malicious way and efforts to stop bad actors from using it to push their agendas. However implementing solutions for these problems can reduce profit and due to current business culture from the perspective of investors, profit is above all and worshipped basically. So in the end Facebook is really down because money is worshipped by those with the power to make changes over trying to create something positive in current business culture in general.

Complexities

Outside of this it’s also a bit more complex, going to simplify it a bit here and it’s also due to those with more power than those who are even part of FB wanting to control Facebook. Due to power structures, FB is just a company at the end of the day and it can’t supercede the power of every individual worldwide to enforce anti fake news algorithms. This is why monopolies aren’t really manageable even and it’s arguable that FB is a social monopoly due to the number of users. They get to a certain size and then existing power structures seek to enforce that power over them and use them for their own means as well and then it becomes unmanageable because FB itself has no way to regulate over existing power structures and there are conflicts between those power structures which one could argue is what led to the most famous incidents on FB.

Examples

IE. Take law enforcement agencies that want to use FB to investigate individuals. In this scenario how would FB have the authority to tell law enforcement agencies what they can or can’t do with FB. Those agencies could spread fake news and then FB as a platform doesn’t actually have the authority to interfere with whatever they choose to do for example. Not saying this is happening but this is one example of a potential scenario that has probably happened in some context. And then on the flipside if FB does interfere they are usually painted negatively for abusing people’s rights to freedom of speech. So in the end there is no win for them on either of those approaches.

This is also just one super small example of how complicated managing all of this becomes and then if FB itself goes against existing power structures then they have to manage legal battles etc which is what’s already happening. So unless FB somehow gains enough legal power to supercede most existing power structures then it is likely going to continue being a circus in the media and also with management in general. It does theoretically generate enough economic power to potentially do this somehow. Personally I don’t want to live in a world governed by an online social platform. However it’s likely FB will just continue as is regardless and it will just continue being a circus as is the nature of an unmanageable monopoly. Personally I think maybe some legislation around user limits even might not be that bad on social platforms in order to stop them from becoming unmanageable akin to previous laws in different legal systems designed to stop companies from growing to the point of being unmanageable.

Obviously enforcing something like that would be rather difficult as it would require access to analytics info etc regarding users. However this could lead to other challenges like platform mechanics duplication ie. social networks under different names with the exact same mechanics. Why do you think Facebook is really down?

Prevention

How can you help prevent social monopolies? By joining other social networks and not over relying on just one. For example there are many new networks that are gaining popularity in the Web 3.0 Space like BitClout for example.