Facebook is in the eye of the storm.
Politicians from both sides of the aisle are livid after a trove of leaked internal documents revealed that Facebook has long known, from its own research, the severe harm its apps can cause.
Consumers are mad from being knocked off the company’s services for six hours on Monday, the longest outage in 13 years.
And investors, who are typically the last to jump ship, are speaking with their wallets, pushing the stock price down 12% in the past three weeks, while the Nasdaq has fallen just 4.5% over that stretch.
It’s a flurry of outrage similar to what hit Facebook in March 2018, when reports surfaced that Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed the data of 87 million Facebook members and used it to target ads for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
The latest crisis stems from reporting by The Wall Street Journal, showing that Facebook clearly understands the addictive nature of its products, and uses that knowledge to make even more money off its users. In particular, Facebook knows its Instagram service can be detrimental to the health of teenagers.
“Facebook is just like Big Tobacco, pushing a product that they know is harmful to the health of young people, pushing it to them early, all so Facebook can make money,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said in a hearing last week held by the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection.
Facebook’s witness at the hearing was Antigone Davis, the company’s global head of safety. She was called on to address a series of stories from the Journal titled “The Facebook Files,” which was based on internal documents provided by a whistleblower.
On Sunday, the whistleblower revealed herself ahead of an interview on the CBS program “60 Minutes” as Frances Haugen, a former product manager at the company. Before leaving Facebook in May, Haugen made copies of at least 209 slides of internal company research.
The public outcry sparked by the Journal’s series ultimately led Facebook to pause its plans to develop Instagram Kids, a version of the app aimed at children 12 and younger.
However, Facebook hasn’t committed to permanently ending it Instagram Kids effort. In a recent chat with his Instagram followers, Facebook’s Instagram chief, Adam Mosseri, said he would allow his young children to use Instagram if there was a customized version of the product for that age group.
