“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” was a statement from a 2019 research report produced by Facebook on the impacts of Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) on teen mental health. This is just one of the many items we learned from the documents and testimony provided by a Facebook whistleblower to the Wall Street Journal, 60 Minutes and Congress. Less than a week later, in countries all over the world for six hours people couldn’t talk to loved ones, conduct business or – in places like Afghanistan and Syria – coordinate travel to escape life or death situations due to a Facebook outage that also took down Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger (all also owned by Facebook).Then during the aforementioned congressional hearings, elected officials demonstrated their lack of understanding of technology that has been around for almost two decades.
Read more