The blue pill has failed to provide the daily dose of dopamine yesterday to literally billions around the world. So far the cause is unknown to the general public, although according to Futurism, "the DNS records that tell systems how to find Facebook.com or Instagram.com got withdrawn this morning(yesterday morning) from the global routing tables”.
"Facebook have basically deplatformed themselves from their own platform."
Great job guys, the world's general IQ score has increased by 2 points while your shitty app was down. I don't know if facebook is back and rolling, I hope not tbh, as I am a "no facebook" advocate, but this event is showing us a lot about the current society and its "well being".
First of all, unfortunately for too many around us, facebook = the internet, and that's not good at all, as it transforms them into passive consumers and products. When you see the internet as a giant soup of information you're able to get the better taste of it.
I would put facebook near pornography in terms of impact on people's brains as both being quite harmful for mental health, but that's a story for another day. Facebook hasn't got drunk all alone yesterday, it took Instagram and whatsapp with it at the party. Imagine you're only using those three as social media apps and you find yourself isolated from the world if they get down.
You no longer have contacts to keep in touch with, for hours, and there's no one to tell you "what's happening in the world". Now imagine that while Facebook was using twitter, as the bird's app has seen record traffic levels, to announce the world the blue pill is down, and working on a fix, someone had already stolen the private data of about 1.5 billion users.
The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally. Everything's fine, no need to worry, you don't get much privacy from facebook anyway...
In late September 2021, a user of a known hacker forum posted an announcement claiming to possess the personal data(name, e-mail, location, gender, phone number, user ID) of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users. The data is currently up for sale on the respective forum platform, with potential buyers having the opportunity to purchase all the data at once or in smaller quantities.
source
No account has been compromised, but the data can be used for that matter, especially for the dumb cases where users have provided their phone number. If I remember correctly, a neighbor of mine was asked to provide his personal ID to facebook as well, a few years ago. I am amazed of how blind people are. I am also amazed why the hell aren't many searching for decentralized platforms such as Hive, as an alternative to facebook.
It already hit the media outlets all over the world that YouTube is turning its censoring guns towards content creators sharing vaccine related data and Facebook was already famous for being a censorship heaven. Twitter is not far behind the two above mentioned, just a slightly better alternative...
I see both situations as a wake up call for decentralization. Relying on a bunch of centralized and censoring apps to live "in a digital era" it's death row for what digital apps should stand for. The situation with facebook is a pure example of putting all your eggs in one basket. When one breaks, all of them follow.
I have deleted my facebook account more than four years ago and the instagram and whatsapp ones have had the same faith, thus I can call myself free from the blue pill. Luckily, less than half year later I joined Hive and what an experience I've had with it... I also use telegram as a messaging app, thus I don't feel like having a handicap in the digital era of communication.
Putting all this into perspective, just ponder for a bit on the idea of Facebook building its own metaverse... What the fuck happens with your avatar living in a centralized so called metaverse, although I don't even know if that's possible, and someone "deplatforms it", out of mistake probably...
Decentralized blockchain is the future, no matter how hard the establishment is trying to fight it, but it needs more exposure to the masses. Luckily its gaining ground and the hope light for a free world hasn't completely faded away.
Thanks for attention,
Adrian