From allowing right-wing extremists to organize an insurrection at the Capitol and facilitating the spread of disinformation on COVID-19 to knowing Instagram is toxic for teen girls to hate speech and violent threats aimed at people of color every day, Facebook is a threat to children, our society, and our democracy. The recent testimony provided by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen before Congress confirmed what many of us feared: Facebook doesn't care about its own role in sowing violence, disinformation, and even suicide—as long as Mark Zuckerburg and the company keep making a profit. Yay capitalism.
This Monday, Facebook experienced the largest outage ever seen: 10.6 million problem reports. So what if people can't access Facebook, though? Besides being integral to many sector's business operations, Facebook not only owns Instagram and WhatsApp. Latin America and Europe practically run on WhatsApp. European and South American friends are the only reason why I still have that damn app on my phone seven years post my volunteer trip to Argentina.
Based on Facebook’s 2020 revenue of $85.97 billion, Monday’s outage cost the company an average of $163,565 in revenue every minute, roughly $60 million based on more than six hours of downtime. That lost revenue is chump change compared with how much market capitalization the company lost on Monday. Facebook shares fell 4.9% Monday, which translates into $47.3 billion in lost market cap. Facebook cares how long we spend on its platforms (including Instagram), because 98% of Facebook's revenue is derived from ads targeted to users. Getting and keeping our attention is Facebook's entire business model.
So what can you do? You're just one person and Facebook is basically Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey at this point.
The Facebook outage showed us just how much money the company stands to lose without our participation.
Basically, all the company cares about is how long we spend on its platforms (including WhatsApp and Instagram), it helps them make money. In short: we, the users, are their entire business model.
Logging off will not only affect their bottom line, it will show them that we can refuse to engage with their platform until they fix it. Take action: mark your calendars for November 10, 2021, when we’ll log off together (at least temporarily).
Are you in to TAKE THE PLEDGE TO LOG OUT (OF FACEBOOK & INSTAGRAM)?
Learn more about The Facebook Logout campaign and its partners at: https://thefacebooklogout.com/about/
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