At the Federal Trade Commission’s monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta’s family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family.
As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly.
“Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over,” a New Yorker headline said about this testimony in a report noting a Meta chart that seemed to back up Zuckerberg’s words. That chart, shared at the trial, showed the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’” had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram.
Supposedly because of this trend, Zuckerberg testified that “it doesn’t matter much” if someone’s friends are on their preferred platform. Every platform has its own value as a discovery engine, Zuckerberg suggested. And Meta platforms increasingly compete on this new playing field against rivals like TikTok, Meta argued, while insisting that it’s not so much focused on beating the FTC’s flagged rivals in the connecting-friends-and-family business, Snap and MeWe.
But while Zuckerberg claims that hosting that kind of content doesn’t move the needle much anymore, owning the biggest platforms that people use daily to connect with friends and family obviously still matters to Meta, MeWe founder Mark Weinstein told Ars. And Meta’s own press releases seem to back that up.
This is ENTIRELY because of Meta’s content algorithms that buried the content from everyone’s friends under a torrent of shit. It’s pretty disingenuous for the company that controls that algorithm to present this as some inevitable fait accompli, something out of their hands, oh well.
But of course Meta was terrified of people just viewing all their friend’s posts and then logging off for the day because, as everyone knows, line must always go up.
EXACTLY. I stop using it as a way to connect with friends and families because of this shit and they fuck with the sorting. Every time you open the app they start showing irrelevant pages after irrelevant pages, and ads here and there, and then finally you get to a single post by your friend, and then continued with irrelevant pages. They’re the one that fucked with their own algorithms and changed their user behaviour, they now turn and lay their blame on the user. Fucking bunch of idiots.
Using Facebook to connect with family and friends is a valid idea … during the Obama administration.
That’s the main reason I stopped using Instagram, I really liked posting photos and seeing stuff that people I knew were doing in the moment. As soon as they stopped the chronological feed I lost interest. I don’t like liking or commenting on week old news.
I remember meeting up with a coworker* one time because he was doing some work near where I was staying for work because he posted a photo as I was scrolling the chrono feed
They don’t want you viewing content from friends, they want you viewing content from the brands that pay them