The Day Facebook Went Dark

A friend texted me, “I cannot remember the last time I pooped without reading memes on Instagram.”  On October 4, 2021, Facebook went dark. So too did its other outlets, WhatsApp and Instagram. The outage came as Congress began hearings on Facebook, complete with a whistleblower, Frances Haugen. Congress wants to know what to do with Facebook. The campaign against Facebook has continued since then and gone global. Yesterday, a friend sent me a picture of the local newspaper here in Macon, Georgia, and the front page of USA Today. Both had articles attacking Facebook.

As governments, progressives, and conservatives fret over what to do with Facebook, the answer of what to do with Facebook is simple — nothing.

Allegedly, Facebook preys on our children, Facebook preys on us, and Facebook allows the easy dissemination of false information. Though Mark Zuckerberg purportedly does not like it when people talk this way, the reality is we are the commodity Facebook sells. Facebook sells our data to advertisers who then tailor targeted ads to us. In exchange, we get free access to a site that allows us to connect to friends, family, memes, cat videos, and the collect rage machine of modern America.  The internet itself largely works the same way.

Leaked data from inside Facebook actually shows Facebook is preying upon our children less and less. Kids think of Facebook as the place for old people. Kids are vastly more interested in YouTube videos, TikTok, and Snapchat. Instagram, my favorite social media outlet, used to be a repository for photographic proof our families are enjoying life. Now, just as often, it is where we go for funny memes. Our kids are leaving it behind for the hilarity of TikTok and the disappearing world of Snapchat pictures. Facebook’s own data shows kids do not think Facebook is cool.

As for the rest of us on Facebook, we organize ourselves into communities of interest. We are incapable of moving on from Buggy, our third-grade best friend who kept sending friend requests despite not having had a meaningful interaction in two decades. Our aunt posts memes equating Jesus to Trump. Our mom becomes friends with our business colleagues and embarrasses us. Then we get into groups and share trashy gossip, memes, and conspiracy theories.

I wrote recently that Facebook has become a neighborhood town square for the old, the stupid, and the angry. It has. For all the good Facebook can do to connect us to long lost friends and family, most of us log on, join communities that look just like us, and ignore the world outside our front door. We think we have far more in common now with Trevor the meme generator who hates the politicians we hate than the Smith family who lives next door and waves each time we come down the street.

Therein lies the problem for major American media outlets. They dislike that we might spread false information on Facebook because we trust Trevor more than them. In 2016, the Russians spent $20,000 targeting Americans with lies about Hillary Clinton on Facebook. Republicans and Democrats spent one hundred times as much on advertisements to tell lies about each other. But the media metastasized that small Russian ad buy into a global conspiracy to steal the election for Donald Trump.

Facebook had been a media darling as the Obama campaign in 2008 and 2012 used Facebook to digitally target potential new voters. Sasha Issenberg, an American journalist, came to fame chronicling Obama’s digital approach. Those of us who had run political campaigns recognized it as basic political voter targeting. The media made it sound exotic and mystical. Facebook just made it easy to target voters online instead of offline. That was all.

When Donald Trump did the same thing in 2016, suddenly the mysticism became a dark magic fueled by Russian money. It was not true. Reporters took the Russian grievance and combined it with their own. Many news outlets made a pivot to video content because of a Facebook algorithm change. Reporters lost their jobs. News outlets went under. News publishers expected Facebook to help bail out the news industry. Then Facebook changed their algorithm again. Video never got the traction Facebook had claimed and the company went back to prioritizing relationships between people who knew each other.

Media outlets were furious. With the Russian ad buying and your crazy aunt sharing memes on Facebook, the media had their narrative against the company. They combined it with partisans who hate a website where conservatives are not so easily banned like Twitter. Facebook has become their menace. When Facebook went dark, media outlets lamented WhatsApp going offline. The Facebook-owned site is used by dissidents globally. Instead of praising Facebook for the security of the site, the press attacked Facebook for WhatsApp being dependent on Facebook. There is a clear bias against Facebook from the press and it largely boils down to one thing — the left presumes it controls the online flow of information and resents that Facebook does not bend its knee to easily. So now they wish to kick its knee from behind.

Given the clear coordination between Frances Haugen and the Democrats (she is a Democrat donor and is relying on a team of Obama era officials before Congress and in coordination with progressives in the press) plus the media campaign around her, I assumed and still do, that some malicious progressive activist within Facebook turned off the lights. In so doing, however, the outage proved why Congress should do nothing to Facebook. Life went on. People did other things. It turned out Facebook has never been that indispensable and people move on to other things.

And maybe, just maybe, if Congress needs to scratch the “just do something” itch, the solution is to find a way for social media companies to go dark one day a week. Otherwise, people are fickle. Their interests will change. The Google algorithm is a far bigger issue anyway, but then that company is reliably progressive.