By Mona Austin
It's been a rough week for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg, who has been on the defensive since the start of the week. Suspiciously on Monday while an ex-emoloyee was testifying against the company in a Senate hearing his social media entities -- Facebook, Instagram and What'sApp all crashed for about six hours causing small businesses who rely to their services to loss profits. In a Blog post Facebook explained that the outage was not caused by hacking as suspected but the sites were disconnected from a router during routine maintenance.
He apologized writing , “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
Meanwhile, another crisis was brewing as a Facebook whistleblower testified on Capitol Hill that the company -- the largest social network in the world --was more interested in money than children's online safety and mental health.
Frances Haugen testified before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday providing an insider's view of the inner workings of the Mark Zuckerburg empire. She claimed Facebook harms children with its deliberate ways of getting users hooked on its content . On 60 Minutes on Sunday she sid Facebook "pays for its profits with our safety."
The tech giant also sowed division on the outside she testified, "The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats and more combat. In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people"
Haugen was a product at Facebook before she left, serving in a capacity that gave her intimate knowledge about the company's goals.
Haugen told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Data Security that no one outside of Facebook knows what goes on inside of the company as it pursues “astronomical profits” over safe-gaurding users.
When she departed she took with her thousands of pages of confidential docuemnts she copied and shared with the government and Wall Street Journal reporters, which they published under reports called the "Facebook Files."
This situation calls into question the need for regulations on tech companies. While most people are happy to have them up and running again, the fact that only Facebook really knows what happened is not assuring. What else do they only know.
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