The Outage & The Whistleblower: Facebook’s Reputation & Profits Precedes the People

Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive Officer of Meta. Photo by Anthony Quintano.

On October 4, 2021, the digital world went black. Facebook, and the multitude of apps under its conglomerate umbrella like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, all went out simultaneously. It started around 11:40 a.m. Eastern Time, lasting for over five hours and rendering the platforms inoperative. Billions of users around the world were deprived of these extremely popular, and often necessary, avenues of communication. In our modern digital age, where people are more connected virtually than ever, the outage served as a wake-up call, revealing just how dependent society is on the Facebook company. The Facebook umbrella includes a variety of apps, capable of live streaming, virtual reality, online messaging, and photo sharing; for some, Facebook is synonymous with the Internet. Today, over 3.5 billion people use the apps owned and operated by Facebook, demonstrating this extreme dependency.

 Facebook has provided many benefits to society: we are more linked with one another than ever before and social interaction only becomes easier with each new technological advancement; business owners can now launch, promote, and sell products online, reaching farther and wider audiences; and the growth of Facebook has supplied countries with thousands of new jobs in construction, administration, and programming among other industries.  It is, however, precisely because of this interconnectedness that the outage was so impactful. Facebook reported in October 2021 that they had acquired 1.930 billion daily users on their platform, making them the most frequented platform in the world. This means that during the outage, almost 2 billion people were left without a daily form of communication, social media, business operations, and more. Furthermore, the smart-home functionality, televisions, and other internet-connected devices operated by Facebook all went out as well. For those few hours, communication, businesses, and even home life went dark.

According to a Facebook memo, this outage was a “HIGH risk to the People, MODERATE risk to Assets, and HIGH risk to the Reputation of Facebook.” This line is incredibly telling of what Facebook, as a company, prioritizes. The portion relating to the “Reputation of Facebook,” stylized in capital letters, reveals the company’s belief that its image  is just as important as “the People” who use the platform, equating them with the same importance. This, in and of itself, should not be a surprise; Facebook is a public social media company, reliant on  stockholders, investors, and the billions of users who utilize the platform daily. However, this issue of reputation becomes problematic when it is prioritized over the wellbeing of these platforms’ users. Dissimulating crucial information that could harm the company’s standing has become common practice for its executives.

Facebook, which once stood as the prime frontrunner in terms of social media companies, has addressed several controversies over the past few years that have greatly tarnished its reputation. None, however, have been as widely publicized and highly detrimental as the 2021 Facebook whistleblower’s revelations. Enter Frances Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook who worked at the company for almost two years before realizing that Facebook’s motivations did not align with her personal beliefs. Haugen believed she had a personal duty to collect confidential research data conducted by Facebook itself and leak it to legislators, regulators, and most importantly, The Wall Street Journal. From these leaked documents, The Wall Street Journal then published a piece analyzing the information collected by Haugen, and the results, previously and purposefully hidden from the public, were disturbing, to say the least.

In a flurry of leaked data, multiple studies were suddenly put in the public eye, after being deliberately hidden from the general population. One found that 13.5 percent of U.K. teen girls’ suicidal thoughts became more persistent after starting to use Instagram. Another found 17 percent of teen girls say that their eating disorders became worse after using Instagram. And another found that 32 percent of teen girls said that Instagram exacerbated body image issues. The worst part about these studies is that they were not conducted by a third party or some other private investigation, but were researched and collected by Facebook itself. The company did not feel it necessary to share this information with any of its users or legislators, hiding data, and then going on to design products targeting the very audience they found were harmed by Facebook.  

One of the leaked documents shockingly stated that “the company has been strategizing about how to market itself to children, referring to preteens as a ‘valuable but untapped audience.’” Another included a presentation in which Facebook researchers legitimately asked if there was “a way to leverage playdates to drive word of hand/growth among kids?”After The Wall Street Journal published the leaked documents, Facebook announced that they were halting the production of a product tailored for children under the age of 13. The very audience that Facebook itself had explicitly found to be harmed by their products were going to be the target of new advertising and design schemes meant to increase the growth of that portion of users.

Because of the nature of the leaked data, Haugen was justified in her actions to act as a whistleblower for the billions of users previously unaware of the potential dangers of the social media platform. The data, researched and analyzed by Facebook itself, warrants a label of public health hazard, as the mental health effects of the platform and its sister social media platforms are concretally impacting a multitude of impressionable young users. Facebook thrives off of user engagement; it wants its consumers to scroll and interact with the app for longer periods of time. An addictive algorithm, promoting limitless scrolling, coupled with dangerous mental health effects result in an extremely hazardous platform, especially when that company prioritizes profits and reputation before the health of its users.

This business model has allowed Facebook to grow exponentially. The company is already massive today and continues to grow. Facebook owns 34.2 million square feet of campus space in the United States alone, with plans to expand its global space by 5.4 million square feet by extending into Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, and Singapore. It generated $85.9 billion in revenue in 2020, with $60 billion coming from just the Facebook app. It has invested over $16 billion into constructing and maintaining its data centers in the United States (and it just so happens that the cause of the massive outage in early October was a change in the infrastructure coordinating internet traffic between data centers). The company wields a monstrous amount of power over its users, and this relationship has been exploited at the expense of the consumer. Haugen, through leaking Facebook’s documents, attempted to protect the users of Facebook, consequently causing a multitude of image problems for the company. Another method of protection could come through legislation.

In a rare moment of bipartisan unity, both Republicans and Democrats, such as Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, have criticized Facebook for its exploitation of users and its addictive algorithm. A coalition composed of members from both sides of the aisle could result in legislation specifically meant to tackle Facebook and other harmful social media platforms. Currently, Section 230 protects social media companies from being sued over what their users post, but lawmakers are configuring ways around the law to lessen the effects of Section 230 or eliminate it altogether. They are contemplating passing a national privacy law, or strengthening the safeguards meant to protect children online, which is one of the most studied demographics affected by Facebook’s detrimental effects on mental health. There have also been discussions on Facebook’s monopoly, but Haugen herself opposes breaking up Facebook into multiple companies, as she believes that this will just make the problem worse and harder to effectively deal with.

However, Facebook itself has already started to morph, in an attempt to shield itself from the negative press it has been receiving as a result of Haugen and the outage. The company, at the direction of Mark Zuckerberg, has rebranded itself as “Meta.” This renaming represents a separation from the company’s past, including Facebook’s identity as a social media company and the controversies it has been tied to and a step towards the future envisioned by Zuckerberg. This future is what he calls the metaverse, which has been defined as the “unification of disparate digital worlds.” Essentially, Meta wants to create a universe which blends together the many virtual and online worlds seamlessly. It is an extremely theoretical concept that could take many years to accomplish, but it shows that Facebook is morphing and evolving. The motivations behind this transformation can be traced back to Facebook’s desire to obtain additional profits by moving into a new social media sector that they believe will become the norm in the coming years. An additional motive could be to save face and protect their increasingly worse reputation by becoming something entirely different from the company that had been in the negative spotlight for so long.

No matter how hard Facebook tries to hide from its faults, the problems that plagued the company have not gone away, including Haugen. She is still actively engaged in the fight against Facebook, and recently has made comments regarding the firm’s shift to Meta. She warned that the metaverse that Zuckerberg is hoping to create could potentially become even more addictive than the existing algorithm already implemented by Facebook. She also said that the metaverse could rob users of data that Meta could eventually sell, violating the privacy of its consumers. Haugen also believes that this morph into the metaverse is an attempt for Facebook to become more lucrative, while also shifting the narrative that has haunted the company. In Haugen’s words, “If you don’t like the conversation, you try to change the conversation.” 

Despite all of these controversies, Facebook’s monthly users have only continued to grow, from 2.7 billion monthly active users in 2020 to 2.9 billion in 2021. As mentioned before, this could be due to the growing dependence of users on the platform, especially in countries where Facebook is the Internet, despite the controversies that have been tied to the company. But, it is not a completely bleak future. Because so many people around the world are dependent on the platform, it seems as if another avenue for change could stem from legislation. Perhaps grassroots lobbying, tailored to legislation that tackles the issues Facebook poses for society, could create change. If legislation is passed to make Facebook change its algorithm or products, especially the ones tailored to the demographics it harms the most, then some positive consequences would result from the whistleblower’s bravery in the face of a mega-company. Only time will tell, but in the meantime, Facebook will no doubt continue to try and shift the narrative tied to its name, defending its precious reputation and profits. The public can only decide if this defense is successful.

Zachary Masone (CC’24) is a staff writer at CPR, majoring in political science with a concentration in history. He can usually be found at the top of Low Steps, unwavering despite the frigid temperatures.