Senator Elizabeth Warren Lauds Facebook Whistleblower Saying "She's Trying to Save Our Democracy"
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren on Monday lauded Facebook's whistleblower, dubbing her as someone who was trying to save America's democracy.
Warren's comments came after she was asked by TMZ on Monday while she was on Capitol Hill, as she praised the tech giant's whistleblower identified as Frances Haugen.
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"She's [Haugen] trying to save our democracy. And she recognizes the kind of threat that Facebook poses," Warren said to the reporter when asked if it was good when the whistleblower came out and spoke against the tech giant.
Warren went on to say that she was worried about the tech giant "putting profits ahead of the kind of information we need."
It can be recalled that during an appearance on "60 Minutes," Haugen alleged that Facebook prioritizes profit over safety, claiming that what she did will "have a big enough impact in the world."
Haugen also mentioned research from Facebook that mentioned political parties saying that they knew how the tech giant its algorithm and "if [they] don't publish angry, hateful, polarizing divisive content, [they] don't like it."
Facebook Back Online Following 6-Hour Outage
Warren's comments lauding Haugen came as Facebook went back online following a 6-hour outage on Monday.
The said outage started before noon Eastern Time and was marked the worst outage for Facebook since 2019 when their site went offline for more than 24 hours.
Aside from Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp were also affected by the outage on Monday, Insider reported. Furthermore, Facebook's internal system also broke the company's internal system, prompting its employees to resort to other platforms, including Outlook, to communicate. The tech giant's engineers were sent to the company's U.S. data centers for troubleshooting and to fix the problem.
Several factors on why the outage in the social media platform occurred surfaced. Dane Knecht, Cloudflare's senior vice president highlighted that the tech giant's border gateway protocol routes suddenly disconnected from the internet. Other speculated factors say that the outage was connected to an "internal protest" over the whistleblower's report, The Verge reported.
Facebook's Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer offered apologies on behalf of the company. Schroepfer noted that their company experienced network issues and their teams worked "as fast as possible" to debug and restore their site.
Mark Zuckerberg Net Worth Affected
Aside from the outage that occurred following Hauge whistleblowing, the net worth of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was affected as it plunges.
According to reports, Mark Zuckerberg's net worth dipped by $7 billion hours after Facebook's stocks fell by roughly 5 percent.
Citing Bloomberg's Scott Carpenter, Zuckerberg's wealth plunged to $120.9 billion, making him the fifth richest person behind Bill Gates.
It can be recalled that Mark Zuckerberg previously rose in the third spot of Bloomberg's Billionaire Index. Before the whistleblower interview on Sunday, the net worth of the Facebook CEO was reported to slide down since September 13, as he lost at least $19 billion.
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Written By: Joshua Summers
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