Compare and contrast the media

 

Fazebook has been down much of the day. They say it is back up now (6:30 pm EST) but you can't post or share.

Trying to find out what is actually going on is quite instructive. I had a freshman sociology class in Florida where we did a bit of 'Comparing and Contrasting' various media sources. So I repeated that today and here is what I found.

From Sputnik I found this story: Facebook Users Reportedly Being Sold on Hacker Forum Amid Worldwide Outage

 The private personal data of 1.5 billion Facebook users is reportedly being sold on a popular hacking forum. 

In late September, an announcement was posted on a hacking forum that claimed to have the name, email, phone number, location, gender, and user ID of 1.5 billion Facebook users. One prospective buyer has allegedly been quoted at $5,000 per 1 million Facebook accounts. This would value the entire set of Facebook user data at $7.5 million. 

In a subsequent post, the seller alleges to represented a large company that works to scrape Facebook for data. The seller adds that the company has been in operation for at least four years and has over 18,000 clients.

The technical failures at Facebook have even prevented its employees from gaining access to company buildings as their access badges have stopped working. It has also been reported that Facebook's internal platforms are out as well.

 

Then in an Associated Press story one finds: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram down in worldwide outage

 A massive global outage plunged Facebook, its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms and many people who rely heavily on these services – including Facebook’s own workforce – into chaos Monday.

The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. and was still unfixed more than six hours later, although scattered users have reported partial restoration of one service or another. Websites and apps often suffer outages of varying size and duration, but hours-long global disruptions are rare.

 

You get to decide which is real and which is not....

Bruce