Things aren’t looking too great over at Facebook. Last week, whistleblower Frances Haugentestified before Congress about the company’s problems.
A leaked trove of documents revealed that Facebook purposely hid research about its platform’s negative effects on mental health in teenagers. Haugen also claimed that the company stoked division by allowing disinformation on the platform to go unchecked.
This all came after a worldwide outage on Monday that made Facebook and its family of apps inaccessible for hours.
But the platform’s reputation has been crumbling for years and calls for internet regulations have been renewed.
Roger McNamee, an early advisor to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, recently wrote in TIME Magazine:
“Facebook will not fix itself. All incentives direct the company to stay on its current course. And recent history would support the cynic’s view that our democracy and government are too broken to rein in any large company. But we are now at a point where further inaction by Congress will likely result in ongoing catastrophes from which we may not recover for a generation or more.”
Is this the final straw? Or just the latest installment in the Facebook saga?
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