On Friday, after a week of unprecedented Facebook outages, users reported yet another glitch. This one was innocuous— maybe even charming: kissing notifications.
For some Facebook users, including me, the bell icon and message icon were touching on Friday afternoon. I like to think that they were in love.
The tiny blip in user design certainly is not the most urgent and important news about Facebook, but it is a tiny crumb of joy amidst crushing reports of Facebook has stoking fear, anger, and division to increase user engagement and then failing to fight the spread of misinformation in an effective way.
In her Senate testimony, former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen said that Facebook and Instagram "stoke division and weaken our democracy" and that the company "puts their astronomical profits before people." Despite the company's repeated problems, the communications behemoth is too big and too pervasive to squash— nearly 3 billion people depend on its services.
Twitter users had some fun with it, creating over-the-top notificaition designs.
