Facebook the company’s disastrous earnings report ended a tough year that was marred by allegations of whistleblowers, major service outages around the world, protests, and controversy about its policies.
Facebook revealed Wednesday that the number of daily logins for its services fell by nearly 500,000 in the three-months ending March 2021. It is the first time that such a decline has occurred in Facebook’s 18 year history.
Facebook shares plummeted 26 percent by Thursday’s close, wiping out $230 billion of the companyâs market capital and at least $29 trillion from its CEO. Mark Zuckerberg‘s net worth.
Zuckerberg blamed the dismal performance on Apple’s privacy changes and increased competition from services such as Tik Tok, but the decline in user activity follows a year of notably bad PR for Facebook.
Perhaps most significantly, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen leaked thousands of internal documents and embarked on a world tour testifying with damaging allegations against the company.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO (seen October), had a difficult year in 2021 that culminated in a dramatic decline in user numbers in the last quarter. This was due to a variety of scandals.
Frances Haugen, an ex-Facebook employee, is a witness before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Data Security. She was speaking at a hearing on Facebook File : Protecting Online Children in October
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new company name Meta at a virtual event held in October. Zuckerberg promised that the virtual reality’metaverseâ he is creating will allow users to do ‘almost anything’
One of the accusations was that Facebook knew about the harmful effects that Instagram had on teenage girls and that it contributed to violence in the developing world.
Another claim based upon the leaks is that Facebook was involved in spreading divisive or false information.
Haugen continues to resist the temptation, and appeared before an Australian parliamentary committee on Thursday. He claimed that Facebook does not invest enough in safety measures for its platforms Down Under.
According to her, Facebook spends a large portion of its safety budget in America and the result is that the rest the world loses.
She said that Facebook is aware of their operations and doesn’t need to reveal the truth. They continue to invest because they are able to get away with the minimum.
Reputation of company damaged by massive global downtime caused by Facebook Services
Facebook also suffered reputation damage from a global outage that lasted more than 5 hours, on October 4.
It is believed {that a} faulty update to Facebook’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which routes traffic between large private networks and the public Internet, left apps and browsers unable to locate the company’s services.
Facebook, Instagram Messenger, WhatsApp, and Messenger all experienced a global outage on Monday. This was due to a faulty configuration that disconnected their servers from the internet. To fix it, engineers needed to travel to Santa Clara’s data center.
According to a purported insider however, the delay was due to ‘lower staffing at data centers because of pandemic measures’ and outages in internal messaging systems as well as physical access card system downtime.
Kieron Harding, an IT Infrastructure Engineer at GRC International Group, told DailyMail.com:Â ‘The nature of the problem meant Facebook would have needed network engineers to physically access their BGP routers â and due to the pandemic, some of the data centers quite possibly don’t have an engineer based on site, or someone who could have immediately started to work on the problem.’
‘One of the reasons why the outage lasted for as long as it did was because the misconfiguration of the BGP also affected Facebook’s physical door access systems â which shut down; meaning engineers couldn’t get into the buildings, or secure rooms, to start fixing the issues straightaway,’ said Harding.
Worldwide users have reported difficulties with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Downdetector.
An employee of Facebook accidentally deleted large portions (pictured), which keep the site online.
Ramesh Srinivasan a UCLA Professor and Expert on Technology and Society, said that the Facebook outage as well as the harmful whistleblower revelations only serve to highlight the necessity for increased government regulation.
‘Just as Facebook is opaque about its internal practices, it’s also pretty opaque when it comes to how its underlying server architecture works,’ said Srinivasan.
He claimed that Facebook and other companies “extracts our attention, outrage, and negative sentiments into trillion dollars valuations,” calling it an “instrument of tormenting us at the seams.”
He said, “Look at our dependence as a nation, as well as the world…on Facebook and even more on corporate, privat, and self-serving technology.” “Look at how blindly dependent we are and the faith that we have placed in some of the most wealthy companies ever to exist in history.”
Biden charged Facebook with ‘killing people’ by spreading misinformation
In July, President Joe Biden Facebook executives responded furiously to the claim that Facebook was ‘killing people with misinformation regarding COVID-19, vaccines’
Biden made these remarks in an answer to a reporter who asked him about his message on ‘platforms such as Facebook’.
He stated, “They’re killing people.” “The unvaccinated are the only ones who have a pandemic,” he said. These people are killing everyone.
Biden apologized for his remarks later, claiming that he was speaking about the misinformation spread on social media by people and not Facebook.
Zuckerberg V Biden. Facebook retaliated against President Biden for he claimed that the company had ‘killed people’ through allowing false information about COVID-19 to spread on its platform
In an interview with CBS This Morning host Gayle King, Zuckerberg rejected the notion that Facebook plays a significant role in discouraging vaccine uptake, insisting that ‘political leaders’ and the media are responsible.
“If you take a look at the different countries around the globe, it is clear that different countries do better than others in getting their citizens vaccines. Zuckerberg stated that this is a problem in the USA.
Zuckerberg said that people use Facebook all over the world. If this were primarily a social media question, you’d see the effects in every country that uses it.
“I feel there’s something different in our ecosystem,” he said. He could be referring to either the media or political figures. I believe this is more than we are seeing elsewhere in Europe. He said that he doesn’t believe that relying solely on social media is the best way to go.
Facebook protesters attacked it after Zuckerberg’s mockery was made by Iceland.
The protests against Facebook spread across the globe by 2021. They concern a variety of policies and practices.
Demonstrators dressed in giant inflatable breasts demonstrated outside Facebook’s central London headquarters on September 11.
Protesters suggested that patients with breast cancer and those who have been tattooed should be allowed to upload images freely, without having to block them or lose access to their accounts.
Haugen’s testimony was followed by demonstrations in several other countries, including Washington DC, London and Brussels.
Protesters with inflatable breasts demonstrate outside Facebook headquarters in London against the September images algorithm. Protesters are demanding that all breast cancer survivors and medical tattoo artists be allowed to post freely without fear.
Flora Rebello Arduini is a Senior Campaigner. She has a 4-metre high sculpture depicting Mark Zuckerberg, riding on a wave of cash, and surrounded with teenagers. It was placed outside of Houses of Parliament in London.
Frances Haugen (Facebook whistleblower), poses in a photo protest organized by SumOfUs prior to Frances’ testimony before the European Parliament in Brussels, November
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg drew mockery with a cringeworthy Fourth of July video showing him riding an electric surfboard while holding an American flag as John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads plays.
The image was taken by social media users who added Jaws to it. It depicts the huge killer shark that is about to eat ‘the Zuck’
A Twitter user asked: “Where is Jaws, when you need him?”
The flag was also added to Titanic by others. Rose Winslet is nearby, while Kate Winslet can be seen standing on a wooden board inside the ship’s flooded corridors.
Zuckerberg’s July Fourth photo was also superimposed onto photos of recent catastrophes at sea including the huge explosion below the Caspian,
A creative user on social media shopped Zuckerberg onto the Gulf of Mexico. This is where a Pemex oil pipeline burst and caused a gas explosion.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Fourth of Jul social media post, in which he drives an electric surfboard and holds an American flag, is receiving the meme treatment.
A handful of social media users photoshop Jaws in the image, as he’s about to eat ‘the Zuck.
Above, Zuckerberg can be seen in the poster for Jaws.
Another user on Twitter wondered “Where’s Jaws?”
A video made by an Icelandic tourism group mocking Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of a name change was released in November.
This video shows Zuckerberg-like Zack Mossbergsson introducing the “Icelandverse”, a parody on Metaverse as part of an Icelandic travel campaign.
Mossbergsson, imitating Zuckerberg’s rigid tone, promotes Iceland.
Video begins with Mossbergsson, the “Chief Visionary officer”, awkwardly speaking to the camera in Zuckerberg’s black sweater. He also has a short haircut.
He responds, “Hello, and welcome to the very natural setting”, “Today, I’d like to discuss a new way to connect the world and not be too weird.”
“Some people said that it was impossible. It’s impossible, some said. We say that it is already here. Seriously. It’s right there,” the Zuckerberg-like Zuckerberg adds, as he views Iceland from his window.
Mark Zuckerberg impersonator Zach Mossbergsson made a Tourism Campaign Video for the Company Inspired by Iceland. He spoofs the Meta announcement by the Facebook founder.
While impersonating Zuckerberg, the actor mimics Zuckerberg’s rigid tone and wears a black sweater. He also sports his short combed hairstyle in the video.
Mossbergsson introduces then the product’s name, which he calls the “Icelandverse”, which is an “enhanced real reality” without the use of silly-looking headsets.
He says, “In our open-world experience, all is real,” as he struggles to unlock a glass door.
He continues, “And has been for millions and years,” he says, resting his hands on the table, his arms folded in silent.
With the rebranding of Meta as Meta by Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg seeks to focus on metaverse.
As it seeks to focus on its virtual reality metaverse, Facebook changed its name from Meta Platforms Inc to Meta in October.
Wednesday’s earnings update was It was the first quarter-end result since October’s company name change. This marked both a shift toward metaverse vision, and away from scandal-prone social networks.
It was revealed that Silicon Valley’s CEOs prioritized safety over growth in the Silicon Valley company.
Frances Haugen, an ex-employee of the US government leaked documents that were used to create scathing reports. But US legislators have not made much progress.
The Real Facebook Oversight Board, an activist group that calls itself The Real Facebook Oversight Board, seized the findings to warn about what might come next.
The group stated that Facebook is now feeling the negative effects from Apple’s privacy first approach.
The statement added, “This will no doubt increase their desire to drive advertising revenue through any means necessary.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to an avatar representing himself during the live streaming virtual and augmented reality conference. The event was held to announce the metabranding of Facebook.
Meta provided a handout photograph showing a frame of Mark Zuckerbergâs speech at the Connect 2021 Conference.
Meta places a lot of faith in its belief that metaverse, the next big evolution in how people live with the web, is Meta.
The future of science fiction will be a futuristic world where the general public uses virtual reality headsets and augmented reality glasses to navigate their way through work, play, or school.
But its construction means tens of billions of {dollars} of investment in the Facebook Reality Labs branch, without any benefits for a long time.
Analyst Debra Aho Williamson stated that there is a lot uncertainty regarding Meta’s investment in metaverse technology and whether or not they will be a benefit to the bottom line.
Meta experienced a drop in daily active users compared to the prior quarter. This is because competition from TikTok (the video sharing platform controlled by China’s ByteDance) heats up.
Meta stated that 3 percent to 4 percent of the world’s monthly active users were merely violating accounts, while 11 percent could have been used.
Meta’s disappointing earnings and the subsequent stock drop brought back fond memories of the bursttech bubble that burst in 2000.
Investors are becoming more selective following the recent record-breaking period in this sector.
Vanda research found that retailers bought high-end tech and EVs in the second half of 2020 and first quarter 2021. Over the last week, large-captech purchases have risen while demand for speculative assets has been very low.
In the early weeks of 2022, around $400 Billion in market capitalization was lost in the FAANG group consisting of Facebook, Amazon and Apple. This is due to lower-cost segments becoming more desirable while central banks cut back on stimulus.
Twitter, Pinterest, Spotify and other social media stock were also hard hit in pre-market trades on Thursday. Spotify is currently in turmoil over misinformation regarding COVID vaccinations. They also published disappointing results.
