Not sure I agree here. People love to blame social media for stoking hatred. Plenty of people use social media like... well, normal people. Life updates, baby pictures, levity.
Some people don't. Social media is a mirror.
People aren't zombies - you're not powerless before an omnipotent algorithm.
This is the big one, and it was a bona fide scandal.
That said it happened in 2016, the story broke in 2018. Cambridge Analytica was very clearly the bad actor here, they took advantage of a too-permissive FB API that was patched.
Facebook was rightly fined for negligence.
> 2020, Facebook announced it won't fact-check political ads
This is not a scandal lol.
Ad platforms are under no obligation to fact-check political ads. Quite the opposite - federal law prohibits television broadcasters from refusing to run an ad from from a qualified political candidate for any reason!
Google does not fact check any ads. Remember those insane Tai Lopez Youtube ads?
> 2020, ex-Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang revealed inner practices profiting from political disinformation and manipulation.
I hadn't heard of this one. From Wikipedia:
>>> Zhang reported that most of these subversive networks use Facebook's organization pages, configured with human names and photographs to mimic human accounts in order to successfully evade Facebook's emerging efforts to counter fake users.
She was on a team dedicated to stopping stuff like this, and she reported that people were figuring out ways around their automation? That's the point of the team! Staying ahead of bad actors!
> 2021, ex-Facebook employee Frances Haugen leaks documents revealing unethical business practices for profit.
Lots of allegations here, no legal consequences (unlike Cambridge Analytica which resulted in billions in fines). Similar to the Zhang story, the whole claim is "Facebook should be doing more than it already does to combat the bad actions of others" not "Facebook is actively doing bad stuff."
From Wikipedia:
>>> Haugen told The Guardian she was motivated to focus her work at Facebook on addressing misinformation because of her experience with losing a friend... after the friend visited online forums and became a proponent of conspiratorial beliefs that included white nationalism and the occult.
>>> In December 2021, Little, Brown & Company announced a book deal with Haugen for her memoir... After leaving Facebook, Haugen relocated to Puerto Rico, and has invested in a cryptocurrency company.
We probably don't agree on tracking being nefarious.
I'm personally just not concerned about being represented by a user ID in a database with info attached to it. Every service I've ever used has this on me and in general I trust US-run public companies with that level of data.
Tech businesses more than most! Equifax leaked my personal info lol, no Silicon Valley companies have.
I don't think Facebook or Instagram is a monopoly in any sense of the word. Lots of people happily don't use either and there's a boatload of competing social media platforms.
If your goal is to thwart software monopolies (a pretty low impact use of FTC time imo) Google search or Visa & Mastercard (duopoly) should be a much higher priority.
The social externalities piece gets into philosophical territory. We "protect" people from cigarettes by taxing them heavily. Yet lots of people still choose to use them. Some would argue we should do the same for social media, others would argue that individuals should be free to decide for themselves. Still others would argue that comparing the health impact of cigarettes to that of social media is ridiculous.
IMO disincentivizing carbon emissions is a much more clear-cut externality to fight against!
They don’t sell data, they let anyone who buys ads choose who the ads go to based on anonymized data.
They also made it way harder to run political ads after public sentiment changed in 2016.
You can go buy an ad from them right now. So can “foreign groups.” Neither of you will get access to anyone’s data.
Same goes for YouTube, Twitter, Snap, etc.
If you’re worried about “foreign groups” there’s this Chinese app called TikTok that knows everything about every American under 30 that no one seems to be concerned about.
I agree with your assessment, and I’m a long term holder. I’d love to hear your rebuttal to the following bear case:
- $10 billion to Reality Labs R&D in 2021 expected to increase annually will eat into earnings
- Last year saw first ever decline in US Facebook user base, expected to continue shrinking (albeit slowly)
- Apple’s 2021 opt-in privacy change makes FB/Insta/Messenger/WhatsApp ads less effective permanently for the highest margin demographic (iPhone users)
- Hugely negative public sentiment* hurts adoption and makes continued litigation headwinds likely
* to be clear, I think the negative sentiment is unfair towards Meta. You use their service and in exchange they show you ads based on your behavior. They’ve always been transparent about that, there’s nothing particularly secretive or nefarious going on.
Ads power most of the free internet stuff we enjoy. YouTube, Snap, Google search, Tiktok, they all do the same thing! But people for whatever reason really seethe when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg and FB.
In fact, it’s pretty insane that TikTok isn’t under more scrutiny in the US from a national security perspective. At least the other ad-powered entertainment apps aren’t controlled by a foreign adversary!