The IT Nerd

A coalition of nonprofits today debuted HowToStopFacebook.org to alter how Facebook operates. Axios has the details:

The campaign hopes to take the outrage expressed by legislators over the revelations of whistleblower Frances Haugen and translate it into action. The campaign is pushing for two goals: A Congressional investigation with subpoena power into harms caused by Facebook; and a strong federal data privacy law that makes it illegal for companies like Facebook and YouTube to collect the vast amounts of data they use to personalize recommendations. The more than 30 groups involved include Accountable Tech, Article 19, Center for Digital Democracy, Fairplay, Global Voices, Media Justice, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Presente, Public Knowledge, United We Dream, Ranking Digital Rights, SumOfUs, Win Without War, and the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center.

You have to assume that Mark Zuckerberg is freaking out right now as nothing that his company has done has stopped the criticism from mounting against Facebook. But even this effort in my opinion isn’t enough because Facebook is simply too toxic and broken to be fix. What we all need to do is #DeleteFacebook so that it shrivels up and dies.

Here we go again.

According to DownDetector, all Facebook services are facing another outage since 11 a.m. PT. However, at least for now, today’s outage does not seem to affect all users. The only thing that I can confirm via browsing Twitter is that Instagram is completely down at the moment.

Facebook has acknowledged the issues:

Having two major outages in one week will shake Facebook users faith in the platform. That on top of their other problems that Facebook has at the moment. It will be interesting to see this one play out and what Facebook has to say about this latest outage. Because I doubt Mark Zuckerberg can afford to lose any more money this week.

UPDATE: This outage is now resolved.

Messaging app Telegram gained over 70 million new users during Monday’s Facebook outage, its founder Pavel Durov said on Tuesday, as people worldwide were left without key messaging services for nearly six hours which is quite the slap in the face of Facebook owned WhatsApp:

Facebook blamed its outage, which kept its 3.5 billion users from accessing services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, on a faulty configuration change. “The daily growth rate of Telegram exceeded the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day,” Durov wrote on his Telegram channel. Durov said some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speeds as millions rushed to sign up at the same time, but that the service worked as usual for the majority.

Now some of these users will flip back to WhatsApp, but I am willing to bet that many won’t. Which means that Facebook who owns WhatsApp is sweating bullets right now. Sucks to be them.

U.S. lawmakers absolutely pounded Facebook today accusing CEO Mark Zuckerberg of pushing for higher profits while being cavalier about user safety and they demanded regulators investigate whistleblower accusations that the social media company harms children and stokes divisions.

Coming a day after Facebook and its units including Instagram suffered a major outage, whistleblower Frances Haugen testified in a congressional hearing that “for more than five hours Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.” In an era when bipartisanship is rare on Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties excoriated the nearly $1 trillion company in a hearing that exemplified the rising anger in Congress with Facebook amid numerous demands for legislative reforms.

As lawmakers criticized Facebook and Zuckerberg, the company’s spokespeople fought back on Twitter, arguing Haugen did not work directly on some of the issues she was being questioned on. Senate Commerce subcommittee chair Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said Facebook knew that its products were addictive, like cigarettes. “Tech now faces that big tobacco jawdropping moment of truth,” he said. He called for Zuckerberg to testify before the committee, and for the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission to investigate the company. “Our children are the ones who are victims. Teens today looking in the mirror feel doubt and insecurity. Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror,” Blumenthal said, adding that Zuckerberg instead was going sailing.

Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team who has turned whistleblower, said Facebook has sought to keep its operations confidential. “Today, no regulator has a menu of solutions for how to fix Facebook, because Facebook didn’t want them to know enough about what’s causing the problems. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been need for a whistleblower,” she said. The top Republican on the subcommittee, Marsha Blackburn, said that Facebook turned a blind eye to children below age 13 on its sites. “It is clear that Facebook prioritizes profit over the well-being of children and all users.”

I also watched Facebook employees try to trash the reputation of Haugen on Twitter today. And there’s only one reason why they would do that: Facebook is scared. This could be their day of reckoning as in my opinion, there’s more than enough out there for Facebook to be in very serious trouble. The question is, will lawmakers and the relevant law enforcement agencies hold Zuckerberg and his lackeys accountable?

Fun fact: This continues tomorrow. That should be fun.

Yesterday’s Facebook outage was massive and could not have come at a worse time for the company given all the issues that it is facing at the moment. But in an attempt at damage control, the company put out a blog post explaining what happened yesterday:

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.

Bad as that was, I=it wasn’t that simple. Brian Krebs got some inside info:

That’s bad. If you can’t get physical access or remote access to roll back a bad change, you need to rethink how you deploy changes as you always have to have a roll back plan as this should not have taken six hours to fix.

This is likely to come up as a topic of conversation in the hearings that Congress is holding. If this were just people being unable to post cat videos for a few hours, that would be one thing. But WhatsApp is effectively a critical piece of communications infrastructure in many countries. India for example where it is routinely used for communication between patients and doctors, for example, and used by many to pay for things. That’s going to get a lot of attention from a lot of people. And Facebook isn’t going to like the attention it’s getting because it may accelerate people making the call to #DeleteFacebook.

Isn’t it ironic that less than 24 hours after being outed as the cause of all evil on planet Earth, Facebook and a whole lot of related services have gone down according to Down Detector? I bet that a whole lot of people at Facebook don’t feel that way as they are likely doing everything possible to get Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and the login services that they provide back online.

Personally, I would feel that the world would be better off if Facebook stayed down. But I’ll update this post with news when it (unfortunately) comes back online.

UPDATE: So this is mind blowing:

How in the world did that happen? And it’s actually worse than that:

This is simply catastrophic. And I am sure that this is making the #DeleteFacebook crowd very happy.

UPDATE #2: Facebook and their related services are slowing starting come back on line…. Six or so hours after this disaster began. Here’s what happened:

Here’s a definition of BGP or Border Gateway Protocol. Total #EpicFail on the part of Facebook. It exposes some serious weaknesses in the platform and how it is managed at a time where they didn’t need trouble on top of the trouble that they already have.

Oh well, for those on Facebook or Instagram, they can stop acting like a smoker going through withdraws now.

UPDATE #3: Not only was it a rough day for Facebook and their stockholders, but it was especially hard on CEO Mark Zuckerberg. According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by more than $6 billion in just a few hours. I feel so sorry for him….. #Sarcasm

UPDATE #4: Facebook just posted this… Ironically on Twitter.

An Iowa data scientist with a computer engineering degree and a Harvard MBA has come forward as the whistleblower leaking damaging information about Facebook to the Wall Street Journal — and that’s just the beginning. They’ve now also filed at least eight complaints with America’s Securities and Exchange Commission, “which has broad oversight over financial markets and has the power to bring charges against companies suspected of misleading investors,” reports the Washington Post. To buttress the complaints, the whistleblower secretly copied “tens of thousands” of pages of internal Facebook research, according to a report on the CBS News show 60 Minutes, which summarizes her ultimate conclusion: “that the company is lying to the public about making significant progress against hate, violence and misinformation. To make matters worse for Facebook, the whistleblower will now appear Tuesday before a U.S. Senate Commerce consumer protection subcommittee, and has already shared some of their documents with Congressional offices probing Facebook, according to the Washington Post. 

At this point, the evidence is mounting that Facebook does no good for the world. Lawmakers needs to drop the hammer on this company. And that day may be coming because it’s illegal to make false statements to your investors. And Facebook made blatantly false statements to investors, and their internal documents prove that their statements were false, and that Facebook knew they were false, and they lied anyways. That’s a crime, and the SEC is the government body that will prosecute it. If you’re Mark Zuckerberg or anyone who works for him, you’re in very deep trouble.

Then there’s the repetitional damage that Facebook is going to suffer. Because there’s proof that they lie, distort the facts, and could care less about doing what’s right as long as the cash keeps coming in. If you’re a parent, do you want you kids dealing with a company like Facebook? In fact, do you as a human being want to be dealing with a company like Facebook? I don’t, which is why after going back and forth on this, I’ve terminated my Instagram account. Because I don’t want to be dealing with a company who are next level scumbags. Deleting your Instagram account is easy and these directions can help you do so. And if you want to delete your Facebook account, these directions can help you to do that as well. I don’t have to do that in my case as I never had a Facebook account.

The events of the last few days make it clear, now more than ever, that we all need to #DeleteFacebook as this company does zero good for society.

Facing increasing amounts pressure about the effects of Instagram having teenage girls, Instagram and its corporate parent Facebook has now promised to make copies of two presentations available to both Congress and the public according to Engadget:

Facebook will publish two internal slide decks detailing its research into how Instagram affects teens’ mental health sometime “in the next few days.” Speaking at an online event hosted by The Atlantic, the company’s policy chief Nick Clegg said the company would release the data to Congress before making it available to the public.

“We’re just making sure that all the Ts are crossed and the Is are dotted so that we can release it both to Congress and then to the public in the next few days,” Clegg said of the slides, some of which have already been made public.

It really sounds to me that they’re trying to edit stuff so that it looks like Instagram isn’t as harmful as it actually is. Which means that this release is meaningless. My advice is the same as always. If you are a parent, #DeleteFacebook from your kids phones and ensure that they never use it. And you can do your part by being a role model for you kids and take the steps to #DeleteFacebook from your phones and your life.

The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, published an article early this morning saying the company is pausing Instagram for Kids. Which is something that corporate parent Facebook had been planning to roll out for some time. But given all the bad press that they have had recently, including leaked memo from Facebook that shows that they are very much aware that Instagram is harmful to teen girls, I guess they had to hit the pause button on that:

We started this project to address an important problem seen across our industry: kids are getting phones younger and younger, misrepresenting their age, and downloading apps that are meant for those 13 or older.

We firmly believe that it’s better for parents to have the option to give their children access to a version of Instagram that is designed for them — where parents can supervise and control their experience — than relying on an app’s ability to verify the age of kids who are too young to have an ID.

While we stand by the need to develop this experience, we’ve decided to pause this project. This will give us time to work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators, to listen to their concerns, and to demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today.

We started this project to address an important problem seen across our industry: kids are getting phones younger and younger, misrepresenting their age, and downloading apps that are meant for those 13 or older.

We firmly believe that it’s better for parents to have the option to give their children access to a version of Instagram that is designed for them — where parents can supervise and control their experience — than relying on an app’s ability to verify the age of kids who are too young to have an ID.

While we stand by the need to develop this experience, we’ve decided to pause this project. This will give us time to work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators, to listen to their concerns, and to demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today.

Here’s the problem. This is nothing but a smokescreen. Facebook is clearly unwilling to do anything meaningful to address what its own research says is a problem. That’s due to the fact that they are trying to make money by targeting the demographic that they their own research says that they are hurting. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, the only way to deal with Facebook is not to deal with Facebook, or their products like Instagram. In other words #DeleteFacebook. Parents, especially ones with teen girls should really act on that.

From the “this is really low, even for Facebook” department comes this New York Times story that Facebook is using its own newsfeed to push positive stories about the company. Check this out:

The effort, which was hatched at an internal meeting in January, had a specific purpose: to use Facebook’s News Feed, the site’s most important digital real estate, to show people positive stories about the social network.

The idea was that pushing pro-Facebook news items — some of them written by the company — would improve its image in the eyes of its users, three people with knowledge of the effort said. But the move was sensitive because Facebook had not previously positioned the News Feed as a place where it burnished its own reputation. Several executives at the meeting were shocked by the proposal, one attendee said.

Project Amplify punctuated a series of decisions that Facebook has made this year to aggressively reshape its image. Since that January meeting, the company has begun a multipronged effort to change its narrative by distancing Mr. Zuckerberg from scandals, reducing outsiders’ access to internal data, burying a potentially negative report about its content and increasing its own advertising to showcase its brand.

That’s really bad. Clearly Facebook isn’t even pretending to give a damn anymore. It’s clearly all about the profits no matter what the cost. Despite the fact that racism, anti-vaccine info and other sorts of bad things are running rampant on Facebook.

Here’s what Facebook had to say about this when asked about it by the New York Times:

Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman, denied that the company had changed its approach.

“People deserve to know the steps we’re taking to address the different issues facing our company — and we’re going to share those steps widely,” he said in a statement.

This isn’t the way to go about doing this. If you combine this with this other story that I wrote earlier today, Facebook has really sunk to a new low. Even by their standards. Thus the option to #DeleteFacebook looks like the best option as I cannot see Facebook changing their ways.