social media
Facebook froze as anti-vaccine comments swarmed users
In March, as claims about the dangers and ineffectiveness of coronavirus vaccines spun across social media and undermined attempts to stop the spread of the virus, some Facebook employees thought they had found a way to help.
By altering how posts about vaccines are ranked in people’s newsfeeds, researchers at the company realized they could curtail the misleading information individuals saw about COVID-19 vaccines and offer users posts from legitimate sources like the World Health Organization.
“Given these results, I’m assuming we’re hoping to launch ASAP,” one Facebook employee wrote, responding to the internal memo about the study.
Instead, Facebook shelved some suggestions from the study. Other changes weren't made until April.
READ: Australia wants Facebook to seek parental consent for kids
When another Facebook researcher suggested disabling some comments on vaccine posts in March until the platform could do a better job of tackling anti-vaccine messages lurking in them, that proposal was ignored at the time.
Critics say the reason Facebook was slow to take action on the ideas is simple: The tech giant worried it might impact the company’s profits.
“Why would you not remove comments? Because engagement is the only thing that matters,” said Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an internet watchdog group. “It drives attention and attention equals eyeballs and eyeballs equal ad revenue.”
In an emailed statement, Facebook said it has made “considerable progress” this year with downgrading vaccine misinformation in users' feeds.
Facebook’s internal discussions were revealed in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions received by Congress were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including The Associated Press.
The trove of documents shows that in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook carefully investigated how its platforms spread misinformation about life-saving vaccines. They also reveal rank-and-file employees regularly suggested solutions for countering anti-vaccine content on the site, to no avail. The Wall Street Journal reported on some of Facebook's efforts to deal with anti-vaccine comments last month.
Facebook's response raises questions about whether the company prioritized controversy and division over the health of its users.
“These people are selling fear and outrage,” said Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early investor in Facebook who is now a vocal critic. “It is not a fluke. It is a business model.”
Typically, Facebook ranks posts by engagement — the total number of likes, dislikes, comments, and reshares. That ranking scheme may work well for innocuous subjects like recipes, dog photos, or the latest viral singalong. But Facebook’s own documents show that when it comes to divisive public health issues like vaccines, engagement-based ranking only emphasizes polarization, disagreement, and doubt.
READ: Communal violence: Facebook cannot deny responsibility, says Hasan Mahmud
To study ways to reduce vaccine misinformation, Facebook researchers changed how posts are ranked for more than 6,000 users in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, and the Philippines. Instead of seeing posts about vaccines that were chosen based on their popularity, these users saw posts selected for their trustworthiness.
The results were striking: a nearly 12% decrease in content that made claims debunked by fact-checkers and an 8% increase in content from authoritative public health organizations such as the WHO or U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Those users also had a 7% decrease in negative interactions on the site.
Employees at the company reacted to the study with exuberance, according to internal exchanges included in the whistleblower’s documents.
“Is there any reason we wouldn’t do this?” one Facebook employee wrote in response to an internal memo outlining how the platform could rein in anti-vaccine content.
Facebook said it did implement many of the study’s findings — but not for another month, a delay that came at a pivotal stage of the global vaccine rollout.
In a statement, company spokeswoman Dani Lever said the internal documents “don’t represent the considerable progress we have made since that time in promoting reliable information about COVID-19 and expanding our policies to remove more harmful COVID and vaccine misinformation.”
The company also said it took time to consider and implement the changes.
Yet the need to act urgently couldn't have been clearer: At that time, states across the U.S. were rolling out vaccines to their most vulnerable — the elderly and sick. And public health officials were worried. Only 10% of the population had received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. And a third of Americans were thinking about skipping the shot entirely, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Despite this, Facebook employees acknowledged they had “no idea” just how bad anti-vaccine sentiment was in the comments sections on Facebook posts. But company research in February found that as much as 60% of the comments on vaccine posts were anti-vaccine or vaccine reluctant.
“That’s a huge problem and we need to fix it,” the presentation on March 9 read.
Even worse, company employees admitted they didn’t have a handle on catching those comments. And if they did, Facebook didn’t have a policy in place to take the comments down. The free-for-all was allowing users to swarm vaccine posts from news outlets or humanitarian organizations with negative comments about vaccines.
“Our ability to detect (vaccine hesitancy) in comments is bad in English — and basically non-existent elsewhere,” another internal memo posted on March 2 said.
Los Angeles resident Derek Beres, an author and fitness instructor, sees anti-vaccine content thrive in the comments every time he promotes immunizations on his accounts on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Last year, Beres began hosting a podcast with friends after they noticed conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and vaccines were swirling on the social media feeds of popular health and wellness influencers.
Earlier this year, when Beres posted a picture of himself receiving the COVID-19 shot, some on social media told him he would likely drop dead in six months’ time.
"The comments section is a dumpster fire for so many people,” Beres said.
Anti-vaccine comments on Facebook grew so bad that even as prominent public health agencies like UNICEF and the World Health Organization were urging people to take the vaccine, the organizations refused to use free advertising that Facebook had given them to promote inoculation, according to the documents.
Some Facebook employees had an idea. While the company worked to hammer out a plan to curb all the anti-vaccine sentiment in the comments, why not disable commenting on posts altogether?
“Very interested in your proposal to remove ALL in-line comments for vaccine posts as a stopgap solution until we can sufficiently detect vaccine hesitancy in comments to refine our removal,” one Facebook employee wrote on March 2.
The suggestion went nowhere until mid-April, when Lever said the company stopped showing previews of popular comments on vaccine posts.
Instead, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on March 15 that the company would start labeling posts about vaccines that described them as safe.
The move allowed Facebook to continue to get high engagement — and ultimately profit — off anti-vaccine comments, said Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
“They were trying to find ways to not reduce engagement but at the same time make it look like they were trying to make some moves toward cleaning up the problems that they caused,” he said.
It’s unrealistic to expect a multi-billion-dollar company like Facebook to voluntarily change a system that has proven to be so lucrative, said Dan Brahmy, CEO of Cyabra, an Israeli tech firm that analyzes social media networks and disinformation. Brahmy said government regulations may be the only thing that could force Facebook to act.
“The reason they didn’t do it is because they didn’t have to,” Brahmy said. “If it hurts the bottom line, it’s undoable.”
Bipartisan legislation in the U.S. Senate would require social media platforms to give users the option of turning off algorithms tech companies use to organize individuals' newsfeeds.
Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota, a sponsor of the bill, asked Facebook whistleblower Haugen to describe the dangers of engagement-based ranking during her testimony before Congress earlier this month.
She said there are other ways of ranking content — for instance, by the quality of the source, or chronologically — that would serve users better. The reason Facebook won’t consider them, she said, is that they would reduce engagement.
“Facebook knows that when they pick out the content ... we spend more time on their platform, they make more money,” Haugen said.
Haugen’s leaked documents also reveal that a relatively small number of Facebook’s anti-vaccine users are rewarded with big pageviews under the tech platform’s current ranking system.
Internal Facebook research presented on March 24 warned that most of the “problematic vaccine content” was coming from a handful of areas on the platform. In Facebook communities where vaccine distrust was highest, the report pegged 50% of anti-vaccine pageviews on just 111 — or .016% — of Facebook accounts.
“Top producers are mostly users serially posting (vaccine hesitancy) content to feed,” the research found.
On that same day, the Center for Countering Digital Hate published an analysis of social media posts that estimated just a dozen Facebook users were responsible for 73% of anti-vaccine posts on the site between February and March. It was a study that Facebook’s leaders in August told the public was “faulty,” despite the internal research published months before that confirmed a small number of accounts drive anti-vaccine sentiment.
Earlier this month, an AP-NORC poll found that most Americans blame social media companies, like Facebook, and their users for misinformation.
But Ahmed said Facebook shouldn't just shoulder blame for that problem.
“Facebook has taken decisions which have led to people receiving misinformation which caused them to die,” Ahmed said. “At this point, there should be a murder investigation.”
What the metaverse is and how it will work
The term “metaverse” seems to be everywhere. Facebook is hiring thousands of engineers in Europe to work on it, while video game companies are outlining their long-term visions for what some consider the next big thing online.
The metaverse, which could spring up again when Facebook releases earnings Monday, is the latest buzzword to capture the tech industry’s imagination.
It could be the future, or it could be the latest grandiose vision by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that doesn’t turn out as expected or isn’t widely adopted for years — if at all.
Plus, many have concerns about a new online world tied to a social media giant that could get access to even more personal data and is accused of failing to stop harmful content.
Here’s what this online world is all about:
Think of it as the internet brought to life, or at least rendered in 3D. Zuckerberg has described it as a “virtual environment” you can go inside of — instead of just looking at on a screen. Essentially, it’s a world of endless, interconnected virtual communities where people can meet, work and play, using virtual reality headsets, augmented reality glasses, smartphone apps or other devices.
It also will incorporate other aspects of online life such as shopping and social media, according to Victoria Petrock, an analyst who follows emerging technologies.
“It’s the next evolution of connectivity where all of those things start to come together in a seamless, doppelganger universe, so you’re living your virtual life the same way you’re living your physical life,” she said.
But keep in mind that “it’s hard to define a label to something that hasn’t been created,” said Tuong Nguyen, an analyst who tracks immersive technologies for research firm Gartner.
Facebook warned it would take 10 to 15 years to develop responsible products for the metaverse, a term coined by writer Neal Stephenson for his 1992 science fiction novel “Snow Crash.”
WHAT WILL I BE ABLE TO DO IN THE METAVERSE?
Things like go to a virtual concert, take a trip online, and buy and try on digital clothing.
The metaverse also could be a game-changer for the work-from-home shift amid the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of seeing co-workers on a video call grid, employees could see them virtually.
Facebook has launched meeting software for companies, called Horizon Workrooms, to use with its Oculus VR headsets, though early reviews have not been great. The headsets cost $300 or more, putting the metaverse’s most cutting-edge experiences out of reach for many.
For those who can afford it, users would be able, through their avatars, to flit between virtual worlds created by different companies.
“A lot of the metaverse experience is going to be around being able to teleport from one experience to another,” Zuckerberg says.
Tech companies still have to figure out how to connect their online platforms to each other. Making it work will require competing technology platforms to agree on a set of standards, so there aren’t “people in the Facebook metaverse and other people in the Microsoft metaverse,” Petrock said.
IS FACEBOOK GOING ALL IN ON THE METAVERSE?
Indeed, Zuckerberg is going big on what he sees as the next generation of the internet because he thinks it’s going to be a big part of the digital economy. He expects people to start seeing Facebook as a metaverse company in coming years rather than a social media company.
A report by tech news site The Verge said Zuckerberg is looking at using Facebook’s annual virtual reality conference this coming week to announce a corporate name change, putting legacy apps like Facebook and Instagram under a metaverse-focused parent company. Facebook hasn’t commented on the report.
Critics wonder if the potential pivot could be an effort to distract from the company’s crises, including antitrust crackdowns, testimony by whistleblowing former employees and concerns about its handling of misinformation.
Former employee Frances Haugen, who accused Facebook’s platforms of harming children and inciting political violence, plans to testify Monday before a United Kingdom parliamentary committee looking to pass online safety legislation.
IS THE METAVERSE JUST A FACEBOOK PROJECT?
No. Zuckerberg has acknowledged that “no one company” will build the metaverse by itself.
Just because Facebook is making a big deal about the metaverse doesn’t mean that it or another tech giant will dominate the space, Nguyen said.
“There are also a lot of startups that could be potential competitors,” he said. “There are new technologies and trends and applications that we’ve yet to discover.”
Video game companies also are taking a leading role. Epic Games, the company behind the popular Fortnite video game, has raised $1 billion from investors to help with its long-term plans for building the metaverse. Game platform Roblox is another big player, outlining its vision of the metaverse as a place where “people can come together within millions of 3D experiences to learn, work, play, create and socialize.”
Consumer brands are getting in on it, too. Italian fashion house Gucci collaborated in June with Roblox to sell a collection of digital-only accessories. Coca-Cola and Clinique have sold digital tokens pitched as a stepping stone to the metaverse.
Zuckerberg’s embrace of the metaverse in some ways contradicts a central tenet of its biggest enthusiasts. They envision the metaverse as online culture’s liberation from tech platforms like Facebook that assumed ownership of people’s accounts, photos, posts and playlists and traded off what they gleaned from that data.
“We want to be able to move around the internet with ease, but we also want to be able to move around the internet in a way we’re not tracked and monitored,” said venture capitalist Steve Jang, a managing partner at Kindred Ventures who focuses on cryptocurrency technology.
WILL THIS BE ANOTHER WAY TO GET MORE OF MY DATA?
It seems clear that Facebook wants to carry its business model, which is based on using personal data to sell targeted advertising, into the metaverse.
“Ads are going to continue being an important part of the strategy across the social media parts of what we do, and it will probably be a meaningful part of the metaverse, too,” Zuckerberg said in the company’s most recent earnings call.
That raises fresh privacy concerns, Nguyen said, involving “all the issues that we have today, and then some we’ve yet to discover because we’re still figuring out what the metaverse will do.”
Petrock she said she’s concerned about Facebook trying to lead the way into a virtual world that could require even more personal data and offer greater potential for abuse and misinformation when it hasn’t fixed those problems in its current platforms.
“I don’t think they fully thought through all the pitfalls,” she said. “I worry they’re not necessarily thinking through all the privacy implications of the metaverse.”
IU student arrested for spreading rumor on social media
The members of Rapid Action Battalion arrested a student of Islamic University from Bokchor Hushtola area in Jashore for spreading rumor on social media Facebook.
RAB Jashore camp company commander Lt Col Naziur Rahman announced the matter in a press conference on Saturday.
The arrested Shovon Das, 27, son of Shyamol Kumar Das, a resident of village Jokarchor in Norail district, was a masters' final student of statistics department of the university.
Read: Disinformation on social media: Badrunnessa College teacher held for questioning
He was shown arrested in a case filed under Digital Security Act with Jashore police station, the RAB official said.
Shovon shared several religious provocative posts and links from his Facebook account at different times from October 15 to October 22.
The post contained various rumors including rape of Hindu women and killing of priests.
Read: A man held for alleged social media posts on militancy
Shovon was produced before court the court, Naziur said.
According to his family members, RAB called Shovon to their Jashore office for discussing regarding the matter of sharing the posts. Later, they shown him arrested.
Apan Thikana: A Great Approach by RJ Kebria to Reunite the Lost Family Members
Apan Thikan is a great initiative by RJ Kebria to help reunite the lost family members. To make it work successfully, the ‘Apan Thikana’ team locates the missing persons based on as accurate evidence as possible. At the beginning of 2021, this program got a huge response from social media. Millions of people across the country have joined this endeavor by sharing the videos containing the interviews of the people who were looking for their parents, son, daughter or other dear ones. Let's get some information about this great approach.
The beginning of Apan Thikana
RJ Kebria used to present a program called Lost and Found on Dhaka FM 90.4. In that program the guests used to talk about their lost parents. The aim was to disseminate the information of the lost person and search for any trace or further information from the audience or whoever listens. Then from the audience, the relatives of many guests recognized them or contacted the ‘Lost and Found’ team. In this way, many families found their lost children.
Read Thoughts of Shams: Solo Content Creator Playing Multiple Characters
Popular RJ Kebria started Apan Thikana on his YouTube channel in the style of this Lost and Found show. The show is basically the first project of his own established Studio of Creative Arts. The first video was released on February 6, 2021. It was about the story of a girl named Nasima finding her lost mother. Three days later, RJ Kebria posted the video on his Facebook page as well.
Apan Thikana across social media
Within a few months of the upload of the show, the activities of the Apan Thikana team came to the notice of everyone. During each investigation, as much information as possible is obtained from the missing person and is carefully matched with the information provided by the family members.
Read Squid Game: Netflix Original Korean Web Series gets worldwide popularity
By now the total number of episodes at Apan Thikana is more than 80. These episodes, become popular with millions of viewers, speak of the miserable lives of lost people.
The grief of Shurovi, who has been missing for 11 years, the grief-stricken parents, the story of a girl who fell into a dilemma identifying her father after 20 years has been widely discussed on social media. And because these stories are shared by people all over the country, it has been possible to understand the audience's reaction to Apan Thikana as well as successfully deliver the lost people to their families.
Read Bangladesh’s first floating Mosque and the story of an Imam of Satkhira
RJ Kebria, a popular name in radio media
How did Kebria become everyone's favorite RJ Kebria? In 2006, he joined ‘Radio Today’ as a ‘Kathabondhu’. Since then, Md. Golam Kebria Sarkar alias RJ Kebria has spent 14 years on radio. RJ, TV presenter, content creator Kebria is currently the station in charge of Radio Amber 102.4 and executive producer of Dhaka FM 90.4.
He has already created a brand of his own by performing Life Stories, Secrets, Star Night, and Lost and Found events. He has also become an entrepreneur by establishing the Studio of Creative Arts. Kebria, a 1st class graduate and postgraduate in Public Administration from Dhaka University, wants to work with people and story-based content. He is the first RJ in Bangladesh to get the honor of getting the YouTube Silver Button for the first time in just five months.
Read Togur: The Molasses Made from Watermelon Juice in Bangladesh
Wrap up
Every show performed by RJ Kebria is all about human life. The specialty of his content is that he presents the story of every human life in an interesting and instructive way for viewers of all walks of life. Along with those events, Apan Thikana is a shining example of the proper application and success of social media. Not just a means of entertainment, social media can be a powerful tool for change.
Facebook unveils new controls for kids using its platforms
Facebook, in the aftermath of damning testimony that its platforms harm children, will be introducing several features including prompting teens to take a break using its photo sharing app Instagram, and “nudging" teens if they are repeatedly looking at the same content that's not conducive to their well-being.
The Menlo Park, California-based Facebook is also planning to introduce new controls for adults of teens on an optional basis so that parents or guardians can supervise what their teens are doing online. These initiatives come after Facebook announced late last month that it was pausing work on its Instagram for Kids project. But critics say the plan lacks details and they are skeptical that the new features would be effective.
The new controls were outlined on Sunday by Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president for global affairs, who made the rounds on various Sunday news shows including CNN's “State of the Union" and ABC's “This Week with George Stephanopoulos" where he was grilled about Facebook's use of algorithms as well as its role in spreading harmful misinformation ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
Read:Could Facebook sue whistleblower Frances Haugen?
“We are constantly iterating in order to improve our products,” Clegg told Dana Bash on “State of the Union" Sunday. “We cannot, with a wave of the wand, make everyone’s life perfect. What we can do is improve our products, so that our products are as safe and as enjoyable to use."
Clegg said that Facebook has invested $13 billion over the past few years in making sure to keep the platform safe and that the company has 40,000 people working on these issues. And while Clegg said that Facebook has done its best to keep harmful content out of its platforms, he says he was open for more regulation and oversight.
“We need greater transparency,” he told CNN’s Bash. He noted that the systems that Facebook has in place should be held to account, if necessary, by regulation so that “people can match what our systems say they’re supposed to do from what actually happens.”
The flurry of interviews came after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former data scientist with Facebook, went before Congress last week to accuse the social media platform of failing to make changes to Instagram after internal research showed apparent harm to some teens and of being dishonest in its public fight against hate and misinformation. Haugen’s accusations were supported by tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in the company’s civic integrity unit.
Read:Ex-Facebook manager criticizes company, urges more oversight
Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a watchdog for the children and media marketing industry, said that he doesn't think introducing controls to help parents supervise teens would be effective since many teens set up secret accounts any way. He was also dubious about how effective nudging teens to take a break or move away from harmful content would be. He noted Facebook needs to show exactly how they would implement it and offer research that shows these tools are effective.
“There is tremendous reason to be skeptical," he said. He added that regulators need to restrict what Facebook does with its algorithms.
He said he also believes that Facebook should cancel its Instagram project for kids.
When Clegg was grilled by both Bash and Stephanopoulos in separate interviews about the use of algorithms in amplifying misinformation ahead of Jan. 6 riots, he responded that if Facebook removed the algorithms people would see more, not less hate speech, and more, not less, misinformation.
Read:Whistleblower: Facebook chose profit over public safety
Clegg told both hosts that the algorithms serve as “giant spam filters."
Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who chairs the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, told Bash in a separate interview Sunday that it's time to update children's privacy laws and offer more transparency in the use of algorithms.
“I appreciate that he is willing to talk about things, but I believe the time for conversation is done," said Klobuchar, referring to Clegg's plan. “The time for action is now.”
Outage highlights how vital Facebook has become worldwide
The six-hour outage at Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp was a headache for many casual users but far more serious for the millions of people worldwide who rely on the social media sites to run their businesses or communicate with relatives, fellow parents, teachers or neighbors.
When all three services went dark Monday, it was a stark reminder of the power and reach of Facebook, which owns the photo-sharing and messaging apps.
Around the world, the breakdown at WhatsApp left many at a loss. In Brazil, the messaging service is by far the most widely used app in the country, installed on 99% of smartphones, according to tech pollster Mobile Time.
WhatsApp has become essential in Brazil to communicate with friends and family, as well as for a variety of other tasks, such as ordering food. Offices, various services and even the courts had trouble making appointments, and phone lines became overwhelmed.
Read: Facebook services restored after worldwide outage
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians in their homeland and abroad fretted over the WhatsApp outage.
Many of the country’s more than 11 million people depend it to alert one another about gang violence in particular neighborhoods or to talk to relatives in the U.S. about money transfers and other important matters. Haitian migrants traveling to the U.S. rely on it to find each other or share key information such as safe places to sleep.
Nelzy Mireille, a 35-year-old unemployed woman who depends on money sent from relatives abroad, said she stopped at a repair shop in the capital of Port-au-Prince because she thought her phone was malfunctioning.
“I was waiting on confirmation on a money transfer from my cousin,” she said. “I was so frustrated.”
“I was not able to hear from my love,” complained 28-year-old Wilkens Bourgogne, referring to his partner, who was in the neighboring Dominican Republic, buying goods to bring back to Haiti. He said he was concerned about her safety because of the violence in their homeland.
“Insecurity makes everyone worry,” he said.
In rebel-held Syria, where the telecommunication infrastructure has been disrupted by war, residents and emergency workers rely mostly on internet communication.
Naser AlMuhawish, a Turkey-based Syrian doctor who monitors coronavirus cases in rebel-held territory in Syria, said WhatsApp is the main communication method used with over 500 workers in the field.
They switched to Skype, but WhatsApp works better when internet service is shaky, he said. If there had been an emergency such as shelling that he needed to warn field workers about, there could have been major problems, he said.
"Luckily this didn’t happen yesterday during the outage,” he said.
But hospitals treating COVID-19 patients in the region were thrown into panic. They lost contact with oxygen suppliers who have no fixed location and are normally reached via WhatsApp. One hospital sent staff member searching for oxygen at nearly two dozen facilities, said Dr. Fadi Hakim of the Syrian American Medical Society.
In Lima, Peru, the breakdown complicated dental technician Mary Mejia’s job. Like most Peruvian medical workers, she uses WhatsApp for a multitude of tasks, including scheduling appointments and ordering crowns.
“Sometimes the doctor will be working on a patient and I need to contact a technician for job,” she said. “To have to step away and make a phone call? It trips us up. We’ve become so accustomed to this tool.”
Millions of Africans use WhatsApp for all their voice calls, so “people felt they were cut off from the world,” said Mark Tinka, a Ugandan who heads engineering at SEACOM, a South Africa-based internet infrastructure company.
Read:Whistleblower: Facebook chose profit over public safety
Many Africans also use WhatsApp to connect with relatives in other countries. Tinka’s stepdaughter lives in Caldwell, Idaho, and lost her father on Sunday, but could not speak with her family back in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, to arrange travel for the funeral.
“It’s amazing just how little folks understand the impact of three or four content companies on the utility of the Internet,” Tinka said.
Facebook said the outage was due to an internal error related to a “configuration change” but gave no details.
The outage came amid a crisis at Facebook, accused by a whistleblower on “60 Minutes” and on Capitol Hill of profiting from hate and division and suppressing research showing that Instagram contributes to body-image problems, eating disorders and thoughts of suicide in young women.
For small businesses, the outages meant hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
Andrawos Bassous is a Palestinian photographer in the Israeli-occupied West Bank whose Facebook page has more than 1 million followers. He has worked with companies including Samsung and Turkish Airlines to create social media content. He said the social media blackout meant he was unable to book appointments or share videos online for companies that employ him.
“Imagine if you promised one of the companies you work for to share their product at a specific time and there is a blackout,” Bassous said.
Sarah Murdoch runs a small Seattle-based travel company called Adventures with Sarah and relies on Facebook Live videos to promote her tours. She estimated the breakdown cost her thousands of dollars in bookings.
“I’ve tried other platforms because I am wary of Facebook, but none of them are as powerful for the type of content I create,” Murdoch said. As for her losses, “it may only be a few people, but we are small enough that it hurts.”
Heather Rader runs How Charming Photography in Linton, Indiana. She takes photographs for schools and sports teams and makes yard signs with the photos. She has her own website but said parents and other customers mostly try to reach her through social media.
She said she might have lost three or four bookings for photo sessions at $200 a client.
“A lot of people only have a specific window when they can do ordering and booking and things like that,” she said. “If they can’t get a direct answer, they go to someone else.”
Read: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram suffer worldwide outage
Tarita Carnduff of Alberta, Canada, said she connects with other parents on Facebook just about every day, and the outage drove home for her how crucial that support is.
“As a parent with special needs kids, it is the only space I found others in similar positions,” she said. “There’s a lot of us that would be lost without it.”
But for others, the breakdown led them to conclude they need less Facebook in their lives.
Anne Vydra said she realized she was spending too much free time scrolling and commenting on posts she disagreed with. She deleted the Facebook app on Tuesday.
“I didn’t want it to come back,” said Vydra, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and does voiceover work. She added: “I realized how much of my time was wasted.”
Photos of teacher with student’s baby on lap at classroom go viral, sparks online debate
Some exceptional photos of a school teacher teaching in a classroom with a baby on his lap have recently gone viral on social media and sparked debate.
The incident took place at the Chinair Anjuman Ara High School in Brahmanbaria Sadar upazila where English teacher Pankaj Madhu was seen taking lessons holding a five-month old child of a student on his lap.
Talking to the UNB correspondent, teacher Pankaj said a class IX student of the school was married off during the closure of the educational institutions due to the Covid pandemic.
Also read: Viral: Woman tortured for failing to pay interest on loan
“When the school reopened after the long closure we noticed the girl was absent. Later, we took initiative to bring back the dropped out student to school,” said Pankaj.
“We came to know that the student was married off and gave birth to a child when we went to visit her house and requested her family to send her back to school,” he said.
On Sunday, the girl came to her school with her child.
“As the school girl was facing problem to attend the class, I took the baby on my lap and started teaching. I had no intention to make the photos viral,” said the teacher.
Many people on social media appreciated the teacher for helping the student by holding her child while some expressed concerned over the baby’s health and hygiene issue.
Many raised questions blaming the mother for taking her child to classroom.
Contacted, headmaster of the school Mosharref Hossain refused to make any comment over the issue.
Also read: Audio clip of Kurigram DC, journo Ariful goes viral
Upazila Education officer Jiban Bhattachariya said the student should not take the child to school as the government did not make school attendance compulsory.
Ex-Facebook manager alleges social network fed Capitol riot
A data scientist who was revealed Sunday as the Facebook whistleblower says that whenever there was a conflict between the public good and what benefited the company, the social media giant would choose its own interests.
Frances Haugen was identified in a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday as the woman who anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement that the company's own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation.
Haugen, who worked at Google and Pinterest before joining Facebook in 2019, said she had asked to work in an area of the company that fights misinformation, since she lost a friend to online conspiracy theories.
“Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety,” she said. Haugen, who will testify before Congress this week, said she hopes that by coming forward the government will put regulations in place to govern the company's activities.
Read: Facebook sorry for ‘primates’ label on video of Black men
She said Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and rabble rousing after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump last year, alleging that contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol.
Post-election, the company dissolved a unit on civic integrity where she had been working, which Haugen said was the moment she realized “I don't trust that they're willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.”
At issue are algorithms that govern what shows up on users' news feeds, and how they favor hateful content. Haugen said a 2018 change to the content flow contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together.
Despite the enmity that the new algorithms were feeding, Facebook found that they helped keep people coming back — a pattern that helped the Menlo Park, California, social media giant sell more of the digital ads that generate most of its advertising.
Facebook’s annual revenue has more than doubled from $56 billion in 2018 to a projected $119 billion this year, based on the estimates of analysts surveyed by FactSet. Meanwhile, the company’s market value has soared from $375 billion at the end of 2018 to nearly $1 trillion now.
Even before the full interview came out on Sunday, a top Facebook executive was deriding the whistleblower’s allegations as “misleading.”
“Social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out,” Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of policy and public affairs wrote to Facebook employees in a memo sent Friday. “But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization.”
Read: Rights group: Facebook amplified Myanmar military propaganda
The “60 Minutes” interview intensifies the spotlight already glaring on Facebook as lawmakers and regulators around the world scrutinize the social networking’s immense power to shape opinions and its polarizing effects on society.
The backlash has been intensifying since The Wall Street Journal’s mid-September publication of an expose that revealed Facebook’s internal research had concluded the social network’s attention-seeking algorithms had helped foster political dissent and contributed to mental health and emotional problems among teens, especially girls. After copying thousands of pages of Facebook's internal research, Haugen leaked them to the Journal to provide the foundation for a succession of stories packaged as as the “Facebook Files.”
Although Facebook asserted the Journal had cherry picked the most damaging information in the internal documents to cast the company in the worst possible light, the revelations prompted an indefinite delay in the rollout of a kids’ version of its popular photo- and video-sharing app, Instagram. Facebook currently requires people to be at least 13 years old to open an Instagram account.
Clegg appeared on CNN's “Reliable Sources” Sunday in another pre-emptive attempt to soften the blow of Haugen's interview.
“Even with the most sophisticated technology, which I believe we deploy, even with the tens of thousands of people that we employ to try and maintain safety and integrity on our platform,” Clegg told CNN, “we’re never going to be absolutely on top of this 100% of the time."
He said that's because of the “instantaneous and spontaneous form of communication" on Facebook, adding, “I think we do more than any reasonable person can expect to.”
Read:Australian court rules media liable for Facebook comments
By choosing to reveal herself on “60 Minutes,” Haugen selected television’s most popular news program, on an evening its viewership is likely to be inflated because, in many parts of the country, it directly followed an NFL matchup between Green Bay and Pittsburgh.
Haugen, 37, is from Iowa and has a degree in computer engineering and a Master's degree in business from Harvard University — the same school that Facebook founder and leader Mark Zuckerberg attended.
Haugen, 37, has filed at least eight complaints with U.S. securities regulators alleging Facebook has violated the law by withholding information about the risks posed by its social network, according to “60 Minutes.” Facebook in turn could take legal action against her if it asserts she stole confidential information from the company.
“No one at Facebook is malevolent," Haugen said during the interview. “But the incentives are misaligned, right? Like, Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. people enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume."
Thoughts of Shams: Solo Content Creator Playing Multiple Characters
Creating innovative fresh content on social media is now a popular trend in Bangladesh and other countries around the world. But the context of building a career based on it is not only surprising but also daring. Thankfully, some creative youths of Bangladesh have stepped into this challenging and inspirational career. ‘Thoughts of Shams’, the brainchild of Shams, has set a shining example of successful online content creation through Facebook and YouTube. Today's feature focuses on Thoughts of Shams.
Personal life of Bangladeshi female YouTuber Shams
The woman behind Thoughts of Shams is known to all as Shams; Her full name is Shams Afroz Chowdhury. Close loved ones call her Prova.
Shams, a girl from Comilla, passed HSC in 2009 with GPA-5 and got admission to BBA in a private university. After graduating, she joined a private bank in 2013 for an internship.
Read:Tale of Hoichoi: The Bengali OTT Platform is Reaching Bengalis worldwide
In 2018, this meritorious student completed her MBA from Dhaka University. Early in her career, Shams taught in a private English medium School.
Although her journey of content creation and marital life began together, neither of them ever stood in the way of each other.
The story of Shams becoming a content creator
During her MBA, Shams continued to prepare herself for BCS and bank jobs. Even after repeatedly applying for jobs, there was no response from anywhere as expected. Instead, she had to return home disappointed from each interview.
While working in a private English medium school, she was not getting a proper evaluation of her work. These situations eventually made Shams anxious about her career.
Read:Web Series "Boli": Chanchal Chowdhury Again in an Unprecedented Character
On August 13, 2017, she created a Facebook page titled ‘Thoughts of Shams’ and started writing about various inconsistencies in society. One day a sudden thought came to her mind, what if she made videos with her written content!
Media: The pain of transition or oblivion?
Bangladesh media suffers from an odd sense of identity crisis. The tabloid media and the mainstream media look largely the same. While the mainstream may be doing less click baiting, the tabloids do it as much as possible, for both a matter of survival now. In the end, both are closer than what mainstream would like to be. The search for differentiated content has become a crisis.
One reason could be that the total news items are probably lesser than the total number of media outlets in town. No one with surety can say how many there are exactly. News is churned out by media workers that are often based on social media content. But even though social media, despite its endless variety can only provide so much news and journalists who cover events are basically doing so sitting at the desk, the news variety is limited and so is the treatment.
Read:Kabul: Is political Islam and socialism over ?
Bangladeshis are used to seeing media as adjunct political workers, that is they will follow political lines and uphold one party’s cause or another. This is the colonial legacy when media workers were also freedom fighters and so on. After 1947, this tradition continued grandly and journalists doubled as pushers of the national cause. Hence the journalist and the politicians became interchangeable identity and that tradition was more established after the Pak army action in 1971.
After 1971, this tradition continued and there have been many cases where political roles were focused both by professionals and by the consumers. It became the critical indicator. Political reporting and editing are partisan and don't require much creativity or even hard work but can gain followers because it’s political. The result is that the media over time has become lazy. But now that is causing a crisis.
Low politics, high corona
For the last few years, the Opposition party failed to mount any significant movement of strength making it less and less significant. As their citadels fell one after another and without much contest, political activities nosedived. Thus depletion of the political sector as a whole became a factor which failed to generate much news. Public interest therefore grew less and less and the media had to resort to sensational news making to fill up the gaps left by the lack of political news.
Second was corona which also killed political news and an unprepared media workforce just kept on repeating numbers in which public interest soon declined. This led to more of the same.
Read:Media: May we have a 'Hurmoni' now, please?
Finally, social media began to do what media had done before, providing sensational, partisan and high voltage news and views including political ones which satisfied various consumer segments.
All these factors together have created a situation in which mainstream and tabloid media are both scrambling for viewers and readers. As IP TV grows but will face the same crisis, it’s time to observe if media in general can make it through the transition as a whole, now knowing where it’s going in the end.