RODRIGO TERRASA
@rterrasa
Madrid
JOSETXU L. PIÑEIRO (ILLUSTRATION)
Updated Wednesday, 6october2021-01: 41
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Technology The culprits of the fall of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram: BGP and DNS
In January 2009,
Mark Zuckeberg
made a commitment to wear a tie every day. He said that this would be his way of getting involved in the seriousness that the economic crisis that was hitting half the planet at that time deserved. A year later, he challenged himself to learn Mandarin Chinese and then eat only meat from animals that he himself had slaughtered. Those were the times when the friendly Mark launched from his Facebook account a resolution for each new year. Like Anne Igartiburu, but from Silicon Valley.
His biggest crisis to date had been a David Fincher film,
The Social Network
, which portrayed him as
a sullen little boy in a hooded tracksuit and unscrupulous
. So, to make up his image, in January 2013 Zuckerberg promised to meet a person every day outside his office and write
Mr Wonderful
handwritten thank you notes
. Then came the year when he wanted to read a book a week. And running 365 miles. And to develop an artificial intelligence that would have the divine voice of Morgan Freeman.
In 2017, with Donald Trump moving to the White House, Zuckerberg decided to visit all the US states before the end of the year and the American press speculated that the powerful founder of Facebook even planned a candidacy for the presidency of the country.
Everything fitted.
Yes, we like.
Almost five years after that, without Trump, Zuckerberg is going through a crisis that makes you laugh at Fincher's movie.
In 2020, for the first time, the sympathetic Mark abandoned his New Year's Eve resolutions.
"In this decade I am going to focus more on the long term," he announced.
Perhaps because the day to day no longer gave him respite.
He didn't say it, but his New Year's resolution was none other than to survive.
With or without a tie.
“Throughout Facebook's 17-year history,
the huge profits from the social network have repeatedly come at the expense of consumer privacy and security
and the integrity of democratic systems. And yet they have never gotten in the way of your success. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (current chief operating officer of Facebook) created a business that has become an unstoppable profit-making machine that could be too powerful to dissolve, "warn journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang in the book
Manipulated
, a An essay that has just arrived in Spain and which thoroughly radiographs the Facebook crisis that started in 2015 and has not yet stopped.
Facebook's profits have come at the expense of consumer privacy and security
Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Only during the last month, Facebook has been shaken by leaks, scandals and exclusions about its internal functioning, a judicial investigation for its opacity and its record of malpractices and a technical failure that this Monday knocked down all its assets for more than six hours. applications, from the Facebook network itself to the services of Instagram or WhatsApp, owned by the same company.
According to data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zuckerberg has lost around 6 billion dollars (5.165 million euros) in recent hours due to the collapse of his company's shares after the service fell. Although his personal fortune has increased this year by about 18 billion, his empire is more fragile than ever to date. More and more people say they don't like Facebook anymore. You know, thumbs down.
«The fall of Facebook for six hours has demonstrated our dependence on their services at all levels: personal, collective, private, public, business level ...
We depend on their applications because we do not have good digital governance systems to take our data and our contacts to another site
.
That is its power, but also its weakness, "explains journalist Esther Paniagua, author of a book with a more than appropriate title,
Error 404
.
Are you ready for a world without internet?
(Ed. Debate).
"The more we connect and the more things we connect, the more vulnerable we are and the greater the domino effect in case of failure," he writes in his book.
"Today you live in a more or less happy world, tomorrow in chaos."
Zuckerberg has gone from being a possible candidate for the presidency of the Government to public enemy number one
Esther paniagua
The six hours of chaos in which WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook collapsed are the best proof of that submission that
Error 404
talks about
, but also the last notch in Zuckeberg's multi-million dollar drama. "He has gone from being a possible candidate for the presidency of the Government to being the number one public enemy in the United States," sums up Paniagua. “His streak is fatal: internal controversies, the Cambridge Analytica crisis, the algorithm change, his conflict with Apple, the publication of
Facebook files
in the
Wall Street Journal ... He
is a victim of his own growth.
The more you grow, the more power you have, the worse things you can do and the worse impact they have.
Facebook has changed because of how it has chosen to develop: it decided to grow on a model based on the attention economy and captology, on the design of its tools so that they are persuasive and have the ability to manipulate and generate addiction.
Let's rewind just a few days before the big blackout. On September 13, the
Wall Street Journal
unveiled the content of a large internal Facebook study that admitted that its social network Instagram is harmful to teens. The report revealed that 32% of underage girls feel bad about their body and that Instagram "makes them feel worse."
Facebook knew that its photo app raised the rates of anxiety and depression in young people
, but Zuckerberg not only did nothing, but also projected a children's Instagram. Facebook reports described children between the ages of 10 and 12 as a mine of "untapped wealth."
The
Wall Street Journal
also uncovered that week that the company's internal analysis admitted that changing its algorithm to reduce the impact of the media and prioritize user interaction had had a perverse effect: it fueled sensationalism, posts by hatred and political polarization.
The report cited Spain as a clear example of the tension that Facebook was fueling.
Zuckerberg didn't do anything either.
“We put people in touch. Period ”
, explained one of the Facebook executives during the 2016 American election campaign, when false news multiplied on the network and there were already suspicions of the misuse of the data of tens of millions of Facebook users by a company called Cambridge Analytica. 'It can be a bad thing if people come in contact for harmful purposes. It may cost some of them their lives by being at the mercy of bullies. Some may be killed in a coordinated terrorist attack using our tools. And yet we still put people in touch.
"Facebook has a conflict of interest," says Esther Paniagua.
«He wants to appear to do things well to respond to user pressure and avoid campaigns against him, but at the same time he does not want to renounce his power and the money that guarantees him
a business model based on keeping our attention at all costs
, regardless of the problems that this creates.
Following the
Wall Street Journal
revelations
, the US Senate questioned Facebook's head of Global Security: Antigone Davis.
"Facebook is like Big Tobacco, it imposes a product that it knows is harmful to the health of young people
," Democratic Senator Ed Markey told him.
"And Instagram is that first childhood cigarette."
Last Sunday, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook manager, admitted on a CBS prime-time show to being the
deep throat
that leaked internal reports to the New York newspaper.
"There were constant conflicts of interest between what is good for the public and what is good for Facebook," Haugen said.
"Facebook always chose to optimize its own interest, earn more money."
In the last quarter of 2020, the company achieved
revenues of 24,135 million euros
, 33% more than in the same period of the previous year.
Its advertising revenue amounted to 27,190 million euros and its profit soared to 9,264 million euros.
There is a data that reflects well the particular crisis of Facebook.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Zuckerberg appeared in the US Congress.
His statement in the Capitol lasted a total of 72 hours and it seemed that it was going to definitely damage the image of the company.
But after answering some 600 questions in a place where the median age was around 75, Facebook shares jumped 4.5% and his fortune was fattened by several billion dollars.
Mark Zuckerberg is a kind of 21st century Rockefeller, but he has a global monopoly
Álvaro Santana-Acuña
"Zuckerberg is a kind of 21st century Rockefeller", points out (through a WhatsApp call, by the way) the Spanish sociologist Álvaro Santana-Acuña, professor at Harvard University - where Zuckerberg himself studied - and professor of Sociology of Big Data at Whitman College.
“It has achieved
a global monopoly
, it has been buying from its competitors in a veiled war and it has caused a situation of global dependency that we could see this Monday.
For thousands of people around the world that time without Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram was the worst time of their lives.
That's why you have to be cautious when talking about the decline of Facebook.
It is difficult for it to sink because it has no replacement, but it does have control mechanisms that prevent you from leaving.
-Is the company in danger in the long term?
-Not in danger.
It is true that you may have unthinkable competition years ago with applications such as Snapchat, TikTok, Discord or Twitch, and it is true that the figure of Zuckerberg has eroded and that the States are acting because they have realized that there are private companies that know more of its citizens than they do, but in this age of super-individualism people still have the need to receive
likes.
Facebook shares on the stock market tumbled after Monday's slide.
When you read these lines, you will have recovered.
"We are far from the collapse of the company," shares social media analyst Carlos Guadián.
“
As long as your applications are useful in people's day-to-day lives, the general user is not going to worry about reputational crises
.
You don't even know them.
Their clienteles are captive because they have no alternative.
If Facebook manages to connect its apps, which could be the reason for its collapse on Monday, it will have a very powerful universal platform.
Something very serious would have to happen for Facebook to disappear.
In short, it would have to stop working for it to stop working.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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