Month: December 2021

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Wish 2021 had been a better year? Facebook probably does, too. The company has long been maligned by politicians, media observers, and consumer advocates, but it wasn’t until 2021 that it felt like the tide truly began to turn.

Though Facebook had faced scandals in the past, from Cambridge Analytica to the Myanmar genocide, this year’s string of missteps and revelations may have tipped the company and its reputation past the point of no return.

For Facebook, trouble started shortly after the new year. On January 6, the company found itself enmeshed in the insurrection at the US Capitol. Both Facebook and Instagram played a key role in radicalizing users who later attended the deadly rally. While the company had acted swiftly in November 2020 to shutter the “Stop the Steal” group formed to undermine the results of the presidential election, it let splinter groups and individuals spawn a “harmful movement” that spread across its platforms. For two months, those groups operated more or less unfettered.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | MSI)

When tech gets stale, one thing the industry does to try to get shoppers excited about new products is offer bigger and better specs. In 2021, a lot of focus went into beefing up the speed specs, measured in hertz, of PC peripherals (a hertz, or Hz, is a unit of frequency representing one cycle per second). We saw vendors increase the polling and refresh rates of everyday devices, turning them into advanced pieces of equipment to pique enthusiast interest.

Here's how it all went down.

First, the monitors

2021 was the year of the hertz, but in order to get there, we have to go back to 2020, when the world was introduced to 360 Hz monitors.