This series is designed to bring together a variety of shorter, readily available podcasts to introduce a topic from recent headlines and inspire discussion.

Events surrounding Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) made lots of headlines over the past week to ten days.  First, a Whistleblower appeared on “60 Minutes” and then went in front of Congress.  And then there was that six-hour outage on all of its platforms.  

Here are some podcasts discussing these headlines.

MarketPlace Minute (as the name suggests, just one minute long,) featured Facebook issues during this time in the following posts. The links below are through Spotify.  You can find the episodes directly on the Marketplace Minute website also, as well as Apple and Google podcasts.

• 10/4 Morning Brief, Facebook whistleblower questions company’s algorithms
• 10/4 Closing Bell, Major outage hits Facebook services 
• 10/5 Morning Brief, Midday Brief, Closing Bell Facebook whistleblower testifies before Congress
• 10/6 Morning Brief Zuckerberg speaks out over Facebook criticisms
• 10/11 Morning Brief Facebook promises changes to help teens.

Longer MarketPlace segments discussed these issues in a bit more depth: 

• 10/8 MarketPlace Tech, Now what, Facebook? (7:58) 
• 10/6 MarketPlace Tech, The WhatsApp outage and its global economic implications (6:59)
• 10/5 MarketPlace, WhatsApp outage highlights the scale of its worldwide use (2:51)

Assignment:

Determine how much time you want to devote to this activity, and assign shorter and or longer podcasts to provide students with background information. 

Have students then tackle these discussion questions.  This can be done individually, in groups, or as a class.

1. Which event do you think had a bigger impact on the Facebook Stock price and activity on October 3, the whistleblower or the outage? (You can use Yahoo Finance to see pricing and choose the time period to include 10/3)
2. Think about the impact of the outage on the following groups, and decide if the impact had a financial element, a social element, or both.
1. Social media consumers
2. Businesses that advertise on Facebook platforms
3. Businesses that are based on Facebook platforms for communication to customers and ordering or otherwise conducting business.
4. People who rely on WhatsApp for communication.
5. Facebook itself.
3. How do you feel about the impact of Facebook platforms on your life as a teen?  Do these platforms increase or decrease your quality of life?  How much time do you spend on them? 

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Looking for podcasts that focus on teachers describing their craft? Be sure to check out NGPF's My Classroom podcast

About the Authors

Ren Makino

Ren started interning at NGPF in 2014, and worked part-time through high school and college. With his knowledge growing alongside NGPF, he joined the team to work full-time after graduating from college in 2020. He is also the producer of the NGPF podcast. During his free time, he likes to try out coffees from different roasters across the world.

Beth Tallman

Beth Tallman entered the working world armed with an MBA in finance and thoroughly enjoyed her first career working in manufacturing and telecommunications, including a stint overseas. She took advantage of an involuntary separation to try teaching high school math, something she had always dreamed of doing. When fate stepped in once again, Beth jumped on the opportunity to combine her passion for numbers, money, and education to develop curriculum and teach personal finance at Oberlin College. Beth now spends her time writing on personal finance and financial education, conducts student workshops, and develops finance curricula and educational content. She is also the Treasurer of Ohio Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.