Commentary: This year included more vaccine misinformation, random internet outages and yet another T-Mobile data breach.
It was another grim year in the world of tech — and beyond.
We all thought 2020 was the pinnacle of awfulness, with a pandemic sweeping the globe, race relations boiling over and misinformation spreading unchecked.
Then 2021 showed up and said, “Hold my beer.”
A lot of the problems we experienced in 2020, from misinformation to ransomware to QAnon, took it up a notch this year. While 2020 was a steady drip of terrible news, this year was arguably worse because the brief glimpses of hope bluetooth headphones we did get — vaccines! — were snatched away — delta variant — leaving us with more uncertainty. The head-fake was devastating.
2021 kicked off with a real low point as a mob, mobilized on social media and emboldened by a call to action by then-President Donald Trump, attacked the US Capitol as members of Congress gathered there to certify the results of Joe Biden’s election win.
The following is a list of the biggest tech fails of 2021, starting with the worst.
Misinformation everywhere (again)
You may be getting some deja vu from 2020’s list. Misinformation was a massive problem last year, and continued to be so in 2021. Whether it was dangerous and utterly false conspiracy theories about vaccine risks or the rise of QAnon, it’s gotten harder to discriminate between what’s real and what’s fake. (QAnon followers are still waiting for long dead John F. Kennedy Jr. to return to Dallas, by the way.)
The amount of anti-vaccine misinformation has led to vaccination rates stalling, driving up case loads and sending more people to the ICU.
Much of the blame falls to social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, where conspiracy theories, false claims and misinformation flew fast and furiously. And it all began early. With New Year’s Day barely behind us, false claims about election fraud — barely contained (again) by social media — drove us to the next item…
Capitol riots
Trump’s speech wasn’t the only catalyst that drove the angry mob to descend upon the Capitol, a violent act that resulted in five deaths. He used Twitter and Facebook to push baseless claims that the election was stolen. Talk of revolution exploded on conservative social media sites such as Parler, which went dark after the riots.
It wasn’t long before conspiracy theories about the mob attack, suggesting it was a “false flag” operation, proliferated on Facebook, Twitter and Parler (before the plug was pulled).
The incident led to Facebook and Twitter banning Trump from their platforms. At that point, however, the damage was done.
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, meanwhile, took flak for saying the US Capitol riot wasn’t “largely organized” on her company’s platform.
Which is a nice segue to our next item.
Sandberg pushing back against any involvement with the riots was just the tip of an iceberg of terrible for Facebook. Criticism sperry shoes has skyrocketed over the last year, from concern over its Instagram for kids project (which the company has paused) to damning allegations from whistleblower Frances Haugen that Facebook prioritized profits over containing a toxic platform filled with hate and misinformation.
Facebook’s own oversight board, set up as a check on the company, said the tech giant has repeatedly failed to be transparent, and Facebook itself said it can’t keep up with the board’s recommendations.
Its slow reaction to the spread of vaccine misinformation led President Joe Biden to say that the company was “killing people,” though he later walked back that statement.
Amid all of the controversy, including a raft of reports based on the leaked Facebook Papers documents from Haugen, the company held its annual virtual reality conference, at which it rebranded itself Meta. The prerecorded event, which talked about the potential of a new metaverse, felt tone deaf in light of the headlines about the company.
Remember when we all had a chuckle at the Ever Given cargo ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal? The little hiccup was just a sliver of the more massive supply chain crisis that has caused shortages in everything from PlayStation 5 consoles to tennis balls.
The result: delays in getting certain products, if you can find them at all, and everyone becoming an expert in the global distribution system. The supply chain has long worked on a delicate balance of supply and demand, and the coronavirus has wrecked it in a way that’ll have us feeling the effects through 2022.
It also means holiday shopping has started earlier than ever amid fears salomon boots of shipping delays. (Here’s a guide to surviving the holiday shopping crunch.) It’s gotten so bad that automakers have had to halt car production because of the shortage of lower-end chips that power much of the electronics in vehicles.
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