Post Reports is the daily podcast from The Washington Post. Unparalleled reporting. Expert insight. Clear analysis. Everything you’ve come to expect from the newsroom of The Post, for your ears. Martine Powers and Elahe Izadi are your hosts, asking the questions you didn’t know you wanted answered. Published weekdays around 5 p.m. Eastern time.
What do we do about Facebook?
Facebook had a bad week. A whistleblower testified before Congress about the danger the company poses, and an outage took down the site and its products for hours. Now, some are rethinking their relationship with Facebook. But can we live without it?
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This week on the hill, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told lawmakers that the company systematically and repeatedly prioritized profits over the safety of its users, painting a detailed picture of an organization where hunger to grow governed decisions, with little concern for the impact on society. Plus, a prolonged global outage on Monday knocked out Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for hours, causing inconvenience for some and serious disruptions for others. And now, it seems many are struggling with this tension: We keep hearing over and over again that Facebook is dangerous. But we can’t seem to live without it even for a couple of hours. So, what do we do about Facebook?
On today’s Post Reports, we hear from social media reporter Elizabeth Dwoskin about Facebook’s disastrous week and Help Desk reporter Heather Kelly about how to make the platform safer for us and our kids in the absence of regulation.