对于某些人来说，Facebook 与天然气和电力一样重要, 研究要求

在十月 4 去年, 脸书 and its other platforms including Instagram的, WhatsApp and Messenger went down globally for close to six hours.

Thousands of disgruntled users took to 推特 to vent their frustrations, 与 one user claiming the outage had ‘ruined’ their day.

现在, a new study claims that the fury when Facebook goes down proves that social media has become as essential as gas and electricity for many people.

A new study claims that the fury when Facebook goes down proves that social media has become as essential as gas and electricity for many people (库存图片)

Researchers from Penn State University analysed 223,815 tweets following the October Facebook outage that used the hashtag #facebookdown.

‘Most media effects research is about showing people media and seeing how they react, but in this study we see that removing media can actually be more informative,’ said Shyam Sundar, 该研究的合著者.

‘This kind of outage provides us an opportunity to see how people reflect on their access to social media, and what we see is that social media has become so important that it’s almost a utility.’

After removing duplicate tweets, the researchers used a statistical model that allowed them to identify the 10 key topics that emerged from the data on the tweets.

The topics included: 投诉, mockery, media reporting, social media detox, log-in desperation, lessons on over-reliance, business impact, problem-solving, personal and professional impact, and social media alternatives.

The analysis revealed that 29,000 tweets following the Facebook outage expressed a desire to find another form of social media.

This suggests that users may not be loyal to one site compared to other, according to Mengqi Liao, first author of the study.

‘What we saw was that as the outage continued, the tweets that talked about the desire to find other social media outlets began to increase,’ Ms Liao.

Researchers from Penn State University analysed 223,815 tweets following the Facebook outage in October, that used the hashtag #facebookdown

After removing duplicate tweets, the researchers used a statistical model that allowed them to create a matrix of the 10 key topics that emerged from the data on the tweets

'事实上, finding new social media sites was the only topic to steadily increase as time went on during the six-hour outage.’

与此同时 35,371 tweets mentioned taking a ‘social media detox’.

‘Beyond the users’ mockery and their descriptions of their desperate efforts to log on, we think it’s interesting that some people were also asking and talking about social media detox, which ranked No. 4 among all the topics,’ Ms Liao added.

While some users simply use social media apps for fun, the researchers highlight that many people now rely on the platforms for their livelihood.

脸书, Instagram and WhatsApp were all brought down for almost seven hours in October 2021, in a massive global outage

While some users simply use social media apps for fun, many people now rely on the platforms for their livelihood

‘It is not simply that people are dependent on it at a social level,’ Professor Sundar said. ‘When these social media sites go down, businesses also will go down.

‘A lot of people engage in business transactions on the whole family of Facebook apps, such as WhatsApp and Instagram.

‘There are newspapers that run completely on Facebook and small businesses and entrepreneurs who have their businesses, like yoga classes that hold lessons through Facebook.

'所以, for some people, it’s a utility because it’s critical to their livelihood.’

绝经后长时间晒太阳会降低女性的雌激素水平, the researchers suggest that social media platforms should look at outages as seriously as utility companies and have plans in place, should they go down again.

‘This study throws light on the fact that social media leaders need to better prepare their companies to face outages and they also have to better prepare their users for possible outages,’ Professor Sundar concluded.

'现在, it doesn’t seem like preparing for outages is even part of their design plan.’