https://on.ft.com/3Bcwc9M
A couple of hours in a working day without access to Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, or Facebook Messenger... The end of the world? Arguably - no. But ask anyone how frustrated they felt when these services became inexplicably inaccessible on Monday of this week. To people like me, who had an urge to connect with family and friends about some great news that I had to share, the disruption was every bit annoying. The world lost its ability to connect and we all had to reckon with the weird reality of not being reliant on Facebook for a couple of hours in the day. But to Facebook, this was not just a glitch that could be explained away. It was a disaster that affected the bottom line; Facebook's share price was negatively affected, closing at a 4.9% decline on Monday evening. And that is the most shocking fact of all; this failure revealed the ugly underbelly of how Facebook makes money by exploiting the human need for connection. Look only to Twitter, where Edward Snowdon took advantage of the outage to urge people onto the free + privacy-focused Signal app. A good point - but did any of us actually switch? What is the customer captivity of Facebook and its brands? Why is it that we can be so frankly outraged at its manipulation of our data, but when the opportunity arises, we find it hard to leave? ...
No comments:
Post a Comment