The fall of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, even if temporary, is an event which can be a turning point on how we see social media and how much we trust these online platforms. Facebook had crashed before, but not for such a long time as last week. The past times this had happened, users switched to Twitter or TikTok, but only for a bit until Facebooks’s platforms returned. This time, these six hours may have changed the future of social media.
It wasn’t even a full day, but this amount of hours in social media may seem like an eternity. Companies have been launching products, new films may have been announced, songs where released, and all the social promotion through these platforms was lost. Due to this fall, companies lost money, and users were lost, without knowing why their favorite social media didn’t work, and some were even scared that they could lose all the pictures and memories they have saved in Instagram or WhatsApp.
It is not the first time that Facebook, world leading company, is involved in scandals. During the US presidential elections of 2016, it was said that data was sold from Facebook to the Republican party runed by Donald Trump, so that they would receive political propaganda of their believes and therefore increase the results in favor of Trump during this time, also through Russian votes.
Facebook denied all these events, but once again, it caused a lot of repulsion to this platform, even though, as worldwide and gigantic as it is, it is still standing on both feet. Even if sometimes it trembles, Facebook is still a leading company in the market, and will still be for years, but we can’t ignore the scandals, and the increasing use of ‘new’ platforms such as TikTok, that also had its scandals (many in China), but that keeps escalating more and more.
