“Go big or go home”, so the saying goes. And Facebook has been going big for the past 15 years, promoting itself as a tool for community building and bringing people together to make the world a better place, for its 2.41 billion active users.
This growth is so significant that in some countries like Myanmar, Facebook is so big that it is regarded as the Internet. Where most post is accepted as news and users share then with zeal. While in some places Facebook growth has given rise to new jobs and access to the Internet for close to free.
With the growth and spread of Facebook what has been the social and economic cost? Let me highlight just two; the Rohingya crisis and ‘pivot to video’. Also we see how these cast shadows on Facebook future with Libra.
Facebook failed to make the world a better place for the Muslims minority people of Rohingya, when they were targeted with messages inciting rape and murder.
These led to more than 700,000 being displaced and Human rights group calling it the largest forced human migration in recent history.
Then, in April 2016, Facebook announced its move to showing video content first to its users, thereby making ‘pivot to video’ a new venture for content creators and advertising media. This move prompted many media house to layoff content writers in order to hire video producers so as to push the new content type favoured by Facebook algorithm.
The change to video won’t have been all bad, but as it turns out, Facebook has in a way intentionally miscalculated the video metric count. The video metric had been designed to capture playback from 3 seconds, with that sponsored videos were having 100% average views. To add to this the videos could not be monetized. The his means cost of video production all gone with no means of generating revenue.
Real humans lost their jobs based on Facebook erroneous video count. And what did Facebook get? Only to pay 0.18% of their annual income as fine.
All of these unchecked mistakes and poor handling has put Facebook in bad light. Real humans losing their lives and soothers losing their means of living.
Little wonder Libra is finding it hard to launch with many partners dropping out and the US senate House Financial Services Committee asking Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg to come testify. Mr. Zuckerberg will appear before congress October 23rd.
If Facebook is left unchecked, its growth will cost a lot of damage to itself and the world it wants to be better. Senator Sherrod Brown (Ohio) said this of Facebook, at a congressional hearing “they certainly don’t respect the power of the technologies they are playing with.
Like a toddler who has gotten his hands on a box of matches, Facebook has burned down the house over and over, and called every arson a learning experience”.
