If you believed that Facebook has your best interests at heart, think again; for years it tested our loyalty, purposely sabotaging its mobile apps in order to see whether we would eventually give up and stop using it. Unfortunately, despite the errors, we just kept coming back to it.
“Facebook has tested the loyalty and patience of Android users by secretly introducing artificial errors that would automatically crash the app for hours at a time. The purpose of the test, which happened several years ago, was to see at what threshold would a person ditch the Facebook app altogether. The company wasn’t able to reach the threshold. … Even if the native app continued to not work, the users would open Facebook on their phone’s mobile browser“, wrote tech reporter Amir Efrati for The Information.
“People never stopped coming back,” an insider told The Information .
Facebook users are quite good at tolerating abuse. Though its CEO has called users “dumb f***s“, after stealing the concept of the company from the two original inventors and undermining his own co-founder… despite its participation in the NSA’s Prism Program and the fact that it had even allowed an “Emotional Manipulation Study” to mess with users’ moods in order to see how negative posts affected them (despite infringing on its own data use policy in the process)… users kept coming back to the platform.
Zuckerberg’s creation of a limited liability company with 99% of his wealth, rather than as a true donation (critics believe that he wanted to save on the inheritance taxes, while still retaining the ability to invest in profitable ventures), seems to have somehow helped him to regain some of his users’ trust.
Although it would fit the modus operendi of someone who calls users “dumb f***s” to purposely torture them with a glitchy app, this is apparently not the intent. Instead, it seems that (according to The Information) Facebook hopes to prepare with a conflict with Google that might cause it to be ejected from the Google Play Store. Facebook might also be considering the launch of its own app store.
“At this time we do not have a statement to provide,” wrote a PR rep in response to an inquiry by CBC News. “However if that changes we will let you know.”
Sources: The Verge, The Information, The Guardian, Gawker, CBC News, Business Insider, Daily Mail
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