Reading what I though was a boring article on why and how facebook (and their other owned apps like instigram and whatsapp) went down.
You know the basic yada yada, why’d the wait so long to explain — yada yada yada businesses lost money, yada yada yada – why did it take so long to fix yada yada yada.
Then the last paragraph struck me.
What would happen if Facebook, instagram, and Twitter all went dark for 24 hours on election day. You know midnight eastern to midnight Easter. What it if was co-ordinated between them all, the heads all got together and said: “We need to shut down for the voting”.
Would it sway the election? Would congress somehow be able to hold them accountable? Could individual candidates sue the social media sites for some kind of political damage?
Here is what got me thinking . . .
Steve Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the fallout might have been far different if the outage took place ahead of or during a major news event, like an election.
“If today were the day before the next presidential election, how would we hold Facebook accountable for an outage with regard to an electoral outcome?” he asked. “We’re not going to redo an election.”
Some people might forget who they were supposed to vote for. It could skew an election for sure.
On a less serious note: I’m sure anyone who paid for political ads that didn’t get run would want a ‘sit down’. (I’m guessing facebook has paid ads. I know so little about facebook it makes me feel smart.)
I think we would all be better off not using social media, or at least cut back. I am officially four years sober from Facebook, now if I can just kick Twitter I will be completely clean.
It would be a fun legal aurgement for law school but really there is no ground to hold them accountable unless you view their platform as part of the public space which is what some people say when they are banned or blocked from using their platforms.
