If you are a social media user it is highly likely you are already aware of Instagram, FaceBook and WhatsApp being down for nearly 6 hours. This may have only been a minor inconvenience to you and me but the more I researched the issue I soon discovered the impacts on small businesses and content creators.
According to Sky News Mark Zuckerberg shared to users "Sorry for the disruption today - I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.” Despite this attempt at an apology, in my opinion, he is failing to identify that these platforms are used for far more than just chatting with friends.
Are they putting their own profits before small businesses? An article on CNBC stated that for some content creators and small businesses ‘losses ranged from a few hundred dollars to at least $5,000.’ The outage was caused by Mark Zuckerberg's push investments into content creation and the introduction of reel to compete with TikTok's short video sharing feature. The purpose of this is to encourage content creators to use their platforms as opposed to TikTok, an extremely successful platform.
Should these social platforms support their content creators? After all, they help to drive traffic to the platforms. Linking this back to ethical theory according to utilitarianism by Bentham you shouldn't use people as a means to an end. They are using content creators to grow their platforms without considering the damage to small businesses losing 6 hours of trading time. It also focuses on the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number, the blackout affected 3.5 billion users.
So who is responsible, should content creators be more prepared and have a back up plan, should Mark Zuckerberg pay out compensation or perhaps government legislation should change? Feel free to comment your own opinion on the matter.
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