Facebook Fallout; Twitch Troubles; Shatner in Space
Written while checking out my neighbor’s Halloween decorations
Apple iPhone 13 Pro night mode turned night into day (Credit: Lance Ulanoff)
Facebook fallout
Last week, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram went offline for over 6 hours, and yet that wasn’t the week’s biggest Facebook news.
Former Facebook employee and current whistleblower Frances Haugen unloaded for hours and hours in front of Senators on Facebook and how, as she sees it, it put profits and growth over public welfare.
During the testimony, Haugen didn’t come across as “anti-Facebook” (“I believe in the potential of Facebook,” she said) but deeply question the internal decisions she witnessed during her two years there and through the documents she grabbed and shared with The Wall Street Journal. She said the company has “not earned our blind faith.”
In her most damning bit, Haugen claimed Facebook “repeatedly misled the public.”
Haugen didn’t call for a breakup of Facebook but as many others have requested over the last few years, “regulation” and, in particular, third-party oversight. She noted that Facebook cannot change on its own.
Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg himself has called for regulation to create a consistent set of rules for all social media. However, in the case of Haugen, he took to Facebook to refute, point-by-point her testimony. “At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and wellbeing. That’s just not true,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Zuckerberg noted how the company has consistently made changes that have shown to decrease people’s time on the platform. "Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?”
In an interesting side note, while I was live-tweeting Haugen’s testimony, one Facebook communication executive took me to task for posting one Haugen statement on how Zuckerberg has refused to implement soft interventions that could slow down the spreading of some information on the platform when it appeared to be being used to incite unrest.
Facebook’s Andy Stone then asked me on Twitter if I would tweet how Haugen reversed herself. I went back and listened to more of the hearing exchange. Haugen didn’t so much reverse herself but say that a few months later, during riots, Zuckerberg finally did implement the soft interventions. Not quite the smoking gun Stone was seeking. For me, it was a worrisome indication that Facebook feels it’s under attack and is responding by going after those who are reporting on the story.
What’s next for Facebook? Well, we’ll keep using it (to the relief of the millions of small businesses that lost a lot of business and money during the outage), and the U.S. government will move ploddingly to some sort of regulatory recommendation. In short: I expect little change.
Twitchy
Last week’s Facebook outage turned out to be the result of an internal tech mistake and they were not alone in their tech missteps. Twitch reported that it was configuration error that led to the public disclosure all of Twitch’s source code and details of payouts to Twitch users, among other things.
Whoever sucked up the treasure trove of information is threatening to release more of it.
I spend little time on Twitch, but I think I may be in the minority. The live-stream gaming platform is wildly popular and profitable for millions of gamers. Microsoft was once so threatened by it that it tried to launch its own competitor (and lure top Twitch stars). It eventually gave up and shuttered the whole thing, which kind of makes Twitch (owned by Amazon) the only game in town.
Now its entire existence is threatened. It leads me to wonder if any digital system can be truly protected from internal miscues and those who want to do them harm.
Back in time
With more and more online publishers deleting legacy content (and other sites collapsing and disappearing from the Internet), it can feel like our digital history is disappearing. This is why I’m a fan of the Internet Archive and its Wayback machine.
Launched 25 years ago, the Archive basically seeks to collect the full corpus of the human publishing on the Internet. Five years later, they launched my favorite tool: The Wayback Machine, which allows you to find a snapshot of virtually any Website going back to almost the dawn of the consumer Internet.
Increasingly, this is the only way I can find records of my own work, like the original PCMag.com, but it’s also a great way to see online pioneers like CNN and Cnet.
The site is celebrating its anniversary later this month with an online event but also doing it with a rather oddball project called the WayForwardMachine. The site is intended as a tongue-in-cheek view of the Internet of 2046 but most of it seems to be a warning about the perils of online surveillance and the tradeoffs we’ll be asked to make for content in the future.
I don’t entirely get it but am happy to celebrate one of my favorite online projects.
Where no actor has gone before
Captain Kirk is finally going to space. Nonagenarian actor, author and frequent horse rider William Shatner is set to take a short flight into space on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space craft. Despite his years of playing the captain of a space-faring ship, Shatner’s never even been close to space (he does enjoy a close relationship with NASA).
In interviews, Shatner sounds thrilled and maybe a little bit nervous about what will only amount to roughly 11 minutes in space (probably fewer of pure weightlessness). If successful, Shatner will go down in the history as the oldest astronaut ever.
This is only the second private citizen Blue Origin flight, but Shatner’s inclusion isn’t surprising. Bezos, who was on the first flight and famously emerged wearing a cowboy hat, is a massive Star Trek fan (Blue Origin’s lobby features a huge scale model of the Starship Enterprise).
Barring any issues or bad weather (high winds already postponed it once), the space craft lifts off on Wednesday at 9:30 AM. I will be watching. Even if you miss the launch, Shatner is filming a documentary on the entire experience.
Missed on Medium:
Stay well
See you soon