Martin Luther King says, "History will write that the greatest tragedy of this stage of social change was not the cruel noise of bad people, but the terrifying silence of good people."
It seems that the good people had finally heard King's words, and decided to break their silence and make their voice heard the whole world with the very simple act of "pressing a star."
With this very simple act, they shook the throne of the largest social media empire of our modern era, the era of artificial intelligence and biased algorithms, or the time of Facebook as some of them liked to say.
And because "the most important thing in communication is hearing what is not being said," as Australian writer and musician Peter Doyle asserts, or unless he is allowed to say in this case, tens of thousands of users from all over the world have launched - who tried Facebook (Facebook) through its various platforms to silence their voices. - A huge campaign to reduce the rating of the Facebook application on the two stores, "Google Play" and "App Store" ("App Store") by giving only one star on a scale of 5 stars to evaluate the application through the two stores, in order to delete it from them at the end.
Lower profits for the first time
This campaign paid off very quickly. On May 20, the app’s rating dropped from 4.9 stars to 1.9 on the App Store and 2.4 via the Google Play Store.
The price of the company's shares also decreased for the first time in 52 weeks by 0.75% per share, to reach a value of $ 316.2, after its value before the campaign was $ 319, according to MarketWatch, which is the largest site for monitoring the shares of major companies on the global stock exchange. .
The app's rating dropped to 2.3 stars on Google Play and 2.4 stars on the App Store (Shutterstock).
It is noteworthy that Facebook's net profits during the first quarter of this year amounted to $ 9.497 billion, compared to $ 4.9 billion in the first quarter of last year, which is equivalent to $ 3.3 per share, compared to $ 1.71 per share during the same period in 2020.
From here we can understand the company's fear of declining its profits for the first time in a long time due to this "simple pressure on Najma" that shook the empire's throne, and prompted its board of directors and its senior leaders to move very quickly to rectify the matter, as a crisis cell was formed to deal with the campaign very seriously, and it was classified However, it is "extremely dangerous" to the reputation and future of the company, which is struggling to stay on the throne of social media platforms in the world, and faces fierce competition in this field.
The company’s management also contacted the administrations of Apple and Google to remove negative reviews in their two app stores, but Apple refused the request, and Google has been slow in responding to it until now
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and the ratings are still very low until the moment of writing these lines, as the app's rating dropped to 2.3 stars in Google Play , And 2.4 in the App Store.
In another attempt to contain the crisis, the company offered through its platform an apology to the Palestinian people and their cause’s advocates around the world, blaming the algorithms for trying to shirk their responsibility and bias towards Israel
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The real horror of Facebook
But what are the effects of the decline in the evaluation of the Facebook application through the stores on the company's income and future?
Ola Al-Farawati, an activist and expert in social media and founder of several companies in e-marketing and information technology, says, “Negative evaluation has direct effects, near-term and long-term, and Facebook fears more long-term effects because it will have severe consequences due to the loss of user confidence, especially among young people. The age who will grow up carrying a previous idea from their parents that Facebook is biased and untrustworthy, which will push them to abandon it in favor of other social media platforms that do not have this bad reputation such as TikTok, Twitch, Snapchat, and Club House (clubhouse), and other applications and competition platforms. "
In fact, this is the real terror of Facebook, which is the loss of confidence of new generations of users and their transfer to other competing platforms.
Ola Farawati: Negative evaluation will lead advertisers to advertise their products and goods on other platforms (Al-Jazeera)
Al-Farawati added that "the short-term effects are that the negative evaluation will directly affect them by descending their ranking in the search engines on the App Store and Google Play, which will lead to advertisers switching to advertise their products and goods on other platforms because the groups with purchasing power of users have abandoned it, especially If we know that advertising revenues represent the largest part of Facebook's income, as it amounted to $ 25.4 billion during the first quarter of this year, up to 46% of the company's total income.
Farawati pointed out that "the biggest concern of Facebook, for many years, was to maintain its position on the throne of social applications, which prompted it to allocate huge sums of money to acquire competing companies, as happened with its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, but it failed the test to banish its political orientations." Pro-Zionism and anti-Palestinian people in all its platforms, which is followed by users in all parts of the world, and will lead to a loss of users' trust even among those who do not care about the Palestinian cause, they will ask themselves: Will Facebook abandon them and fight them when they write about their political and social issues of their own. In their countries?
The asterisk means a lot
For his part, Yazan Sawalha, an expert and blogger in the field of information technology and e-marketing platforms, said: “Evaluating the various applications through the Google Play and App Store stores is one of the most important means of marketing the application and its spread, and the low evaluation of the Facebook application due to this global campaign will have major consequences for its spread, and reap the benefits. "Through marketing through it. An application that gets a rating above 4 stars, for example, will appear to more users and potential customers, and this is one of the marketing persuasion methods that the store uses to reward the highly rated applications."
The technical expert adds that if the rating decreases, this will directly affect the rating of the application itself, and prevent it from appearing as one of the applications proposed in its category by the online store, and then it will affect the appearance of the application in search engines, and when any application receives a rating of less than 3 stars, it becomes His marketing opportunities are much less inside the store, which will directly affect the financial returns he can reap.
Al-Sawalha continues, "The impact will be greater on the company developing the application, as bad evaluations will affect the trading price of the company's shares, which will lead to material losses as happened during recent events, as the price of Facebook's shares decreased in global stock exchanges, and direct losses amounted to more than $ 5 million, according to Trading reports for the platform.
Yazan Al-Sawalha: The impact will be greater on the company developing the application as the bad evaluations will affect the trading price of the company's shares (Al-Jazeera)
Delete the application
But will the application be removed from the stores if its user rating continues to drop?
Sawalha says, "There are several factors that are taken into consideration before deleting, especially if the application has reached close to a star, so the basis for the evaluation through the online store has been recently modified to become the last published version of the application in the store, and if the updated version reaches a low rating, the online store will withdraw The application and sending a notice to the company for review in preparation for raising it again on the store after avoiding the reasons for the ban, and this is the reason for the difference in the evaluation numbers from one device to another.
The application that has been deleted has the right to send a review request to the online store regarding low ratings, as happened previously with the TikTok application, whose rating decreased to less than two stars, which led to its deletion after it was one of the most popular applications, after the fierce campaign launched on the application, and its evaluation decreased as a result. To two stars, after his rating was 4.8 stars before the campaign.
Sawalha asserts that "deletion is possible but difficult," noting that the current campaign in support of the Palestinian cause has many positive aspects. Even if it did not succeed in removing the Facebook application from the traffickers, it succeeded in putting pressure on the platform to a great extent and gave a lesson for other platforms to be more fair in dealing with the issue. Palestinian.
Likewise, the great shock that hit Facebook and its affiliated platforms - continues Sawalha - has caused a sensation worldwide, which prompted the Facebook and Instagram applications to send messages of apology to the Palestinian people, and even communicate with some of the cause’s activists on social media sites to meet and consult in the problems. Facing the Palestinian content on the platform as a result of the algorithms put in place, with the aim of modifying it to be more equitable in the future.