Afghanistan Girls Soccer Team.Photo: AP
Whilethe outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsAppon Monday posed an inconvenience for many social media users, it could have caused more severe issues across the developing world, an expert tells PEOPLE.
Nic McKinley is the founder of DeliverFund, a nonprofit normally focused on fighting human trafficking. Recently, he used WhatsApp to help coordinatethe evacuationof the Afghanistan national girls soccer team after the countryfell to the Taliban last month.
On Monday, McKinley explained to PEOPLE that there are several ways in which people in developing nations and underserved communities can face additional hardship if they lose access to social media platforms, like WhatsApp.
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“They’re not free to download Signal or other comparable apps. So now their communications are completely exposed to their governments,” he told PEOPLE. Signal is a messaging platform that allows for secure communications with end-to-end encryption for groups and individuals.
Not having access to a secure messaging platform doesn’t only impact dissidents, or those who might be trying to hide their communications from the government, McKinley added.
“If you’re a regular person who is trying to figure out what the best price for your goats are, you are impacted,” he said. “The world has really taken technologies for granted, so most likely they don’t have a backup for that group on WhatsApp that crowdsources the best goat prices at different markets. That now isn’t available, so that person needs to take the risk for going to the wrong market.”
AP
McKinley said the hours-long outage “could really hurt some people.”
However, he also acknowledged there are scenarios in which less access to social media can keep some people safe.
Last year, a United Nations committee found that human trafficking through the internethad risen globallyamid the coronavirus pandemic. Online, perpetrators have easy access to potential victims and are able to keep their own identities hidden “through social media, dark web and messaging platforms,” the committee said.
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McKinley told PEOPLE on Monday that “social media is also the no. 1 entry point for human trafficking.” So, during an outage, these online operations are shut down — at least for a few hours.
“For the first time in history, a non-familial man, who is 40 years older than the child he is going to exploit, who is 6,000 miles away, can interface with a 12-year-old girl at the very moment she says she is mad at her dad — at the very moment of vulnerability,” he said. “That never happened in the history of the world till the modern era. That’s why we have seen such a proliferation of human trafficking.”
He concluded, “So, in some ways this is good. In other ways, this is bad.”
Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty
Monday’s crash marked the worst outage for Facebook since 2008 when a bug caused Facebook to be offline for nearly a day, according toCNBC, which also reported that there was an hour-long outage back in 2019 when Facebook blamed the issue on a server configuration change.
The three Facebook-owned appsappeared to come back online around 6 p.m. ET. The tech giant has yet to say what caused the hours-long outage.
“To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” Facebook tweeted shortly after its apps were restored. “We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.”
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, two Facebook employees toldThe New York Timeson Monday that “it was unlikely that a cyberattack caused the issues.”
source: people.com
