When it goes dark: Facebook’s terrible week
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 October 2021
⏱️ ? minutes
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Summary
Yesterday’s global outage is not even the worst of it: today’s congressional testimony will examine a whistleblower’s allegations that the company knows its products cause widespread harm. The modern food-industrial complex is great for eaters but appalling for the planet; we examine technological fixes, and whether consumers will bite. And how Afghanistan's embassies abroad are—or aren’t—dealing with the Taliban.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. |
| 0:09.0 | Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:17.6 | In one view, the modern food industry is a triumph of agriculture and globalization. In |
| 0:23.0 | another, it's an unsustainable, carbon-belching ecosystem-recking mess. We look into technological |
| 0:29.2 | bits to ease the pressure and how they can be made to work. And following the Taliban's |
| 0:34.3 | takeover of Afghanistan, what are the staff of the country's embassies abroad to do? |
| 0:39.8 | Funds have dried up, but consular services are still in demand. We examine a suddenly |
| 0:44.7 | very different diplomatic mission. |
| 0:46.7 | But first, in case you're in the roughly half of humanity that doesn't use Facebook's |
| 1:04.0 | services, I can tell you that yesterday was a trying day for the other half. |
| 1:08.7 | Social media giant Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp services have been hit by widespread |
| 1:13.6 | outages. It was the worst outage in 13 years. And for many of those three and a half |
| 1:18.8 | billion users, it was mayhem. |
| 1:22.5 | Facebook services are back, mostly, but a big chunk of downtime isn't even the worst |
| 1:37.2 | thing to happen to Facebook this week. Former employee Francis Hogan has handed over a vast |
| 1:43.1 | pile of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal. What she has to say and said on CBS's |
| 1:49.2 | 60 Minutes this weekend isn't pretty. |
| 1:51.6 | It is subsidizing its pain for its profits with our safety. |
| 1:56.2 | The leaks are as troubling as they are revealing. The company allegedly knows that Instagram |
| 2:01.0 | fuels body image disorders among teenage girls. But Facebook's algorithm disproportionately |
| 2:06.6 | amplifies divisive content that it does in fact contribute to election misinformation. |
| 2:13.1 | Facebook has said that its services do not promote societal polarization. |
... |
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