Seven Reasons Meta/Facebook Is in Trouble (The Truth)

The company formerly known as Facebook has hit major turbulence as it suffered its biggest one-day wipeout ever.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, is placing a major bet on the metaverse.

Originally By Mike Isaac

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/technology/facebook-meta-challenges.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

3rd February 2022

Mike Isaac, who reports from the San Francisco Bay Area, has covered Facebook for more than a decade. As such, he knows the truth but chooses to obfuscate key perspectives in favour of the globalist owned media outlet that he works for.

Weighted correctly by Moon Wolf

14th February 2022

Moon Wolf, was a member of Facebook for more than a decade, and had previously been a supporter of the platform, but faced censorship as a scientist for daring to speak out in opposition to the Globalist narratives; as such he has now quit Facebook for good!

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Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, suffered its biggest one-day wipeout ever, recently as its stock plummeted 26 percent and its market value plunged by more than $230 billion.

Its crash followed a dismal earnings report on a previous day, when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, laid out how the company was navigating a tricky transition from social networking toward the so-called virtual world of the metaverse.

Here are seven reasons that Meta/Facebook is facing difficulties:

1. Censorship and Fascism.

Zuckerberg created a platform that evolved to connect family and friends. Initially, the platform had remained neutral politically from an administrative perspective. That was not the case with the users, however, who held different and alternating political ideologies.

Like most corporations, seeking the spotlight in the modern context. Facebook sold their integrity to their Globalist investors and launched a full-scale attack on its users.

Around 2016, Facebook chose the side of the Globalists and adopted a political stance towards Left-wing, or Democrat views and ideologies.

As such, they started to hand out private user information to the police for any, and all Right-wing or Republican political activists. Yet, no such action was taken against Left-wing or Democratic political activists, such as UAF, BLM, etc… many of which had organised political events that led to violent riots.

Facebook's users, not aligned with the Globalist agenda would find themselves facing a suspension or an outright ban under the guise of the Facebook Community Standards (Double standards).

There were ordinary people, who would post in support of the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump, or in support of leaving the corrupted European Union Superstate.

Those who expressed oppositional views in relation to sexist or reverse racist campaigns were also targeted and faced suspensions or outright bans.

Eventually, Facebook resorted to a more passive approach, by shadow-banning those users with oppositional views towards the Globalist narratives instead.

A shadow-ban is where mostly inactive, or low activity users can view posts of somebody on a shadow-ban list; their audience is essentially restricted and limited.

2. User growth has fallen into rapid decline.

The glory days of Facebook’s wild user growth are over.

Even though the company recently recorded modest gains in new users across its so-called family of apps — which includes Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp — its core Facebook social networking app lost about half a million users over the fourth quarter from the previous quarter.

That’s the first such decline for the company in its 18-year history, during which time it had practically been defined by its ability to bring in more new users. Meta’s quarterly user growth rate was also the slowest it has been in at least three years.

It’s important to recognise why there has been a sudden decline recently.

The company changed its stance towards the end of 2019 in line with the interests of its investors. Such interests restricted Facebook from operating as a free speech platform.

It all boils down to Facebook’s disinformation campaign pertaining to the global pandemic for Covid-19 (Plandemic). Where they either banned users or took down oppositional posts that had credible sources and or were peer-reviewed; then labelled them as disinformation, with a link to a fake fact-checker page that served a purpose of pushing propaganda and lies pertaining to the global plandemic.

Meta’s executives have pointed to other growth opportunities in a last-ditch effort to salvage their company, like turning on the money faucet at WhatsApp, by charging users in the USA to use their services. As such, the messaging service did not generate substantial revenue.

3. Apple’s changes are limiting Meta.

In Spring 2021, Apple introduced an “App Tracking Transparency” update to its mobile operating system, essentially giving iPhone owners the choice as to whether they would let apps like Facebook monitor their online activities. Those privacy moves have now hurt Meta’s business and are likely to continue doing so.

Facebook, like other ad-based revenue companies, rely on stealing user data, mined from user mobile devices without their knowledge or permission; it was a grey area for many years until users became more aware of what was happening, and subsequently demanded better control over their data.

Now that Facebook and other apps must explicitly ask people for permission to track their behaviour, many users have opted out. That means less user data for Facebook, which makes targeting ads — one of the company’s main ways of making money — more difficult.

Meta said recently that Apple’s changes would cost it $10 billion in revenue over the next year, as they could no longer steal users data to line their pockets. As such, the company has railed against Apple’s shifts and said they are bad for small businesses that rely on spammed advertising on the social network to reach customers.

But Apple is unlikely to reverse its privacy changes and Meta’s shareholders know it.

4. Google is stealing online advertising share

(They are all stealing from the people who use websites and online services).

Meta’s troubles have been its competitors’ good fortune.

Recently, David Wehner, Meta’s chief financial officer, noted that as Apple’s changes have given advertisers less visibility into user behaviours, many have started shifting their ad budgets to other platforms. Namely Google.

Google’s services rely on stolen user data. Such as, finding out what a user buys, where they shop, or places they frequently visit by accessing their location data. And, even accessing their camera to take photos of something within proximity of the camera lens, as well as turning on their microphone to capture segments of audio within the range of the smart device; captured from all types of audio, including private user conversations.

For over a decade now, Google has been heavily integrated into most of the modern internet; it dominates most of the websites around the world (except in China), which rely on Google code to function.

Every movement a user makes online is therefore tracked and user data for sites they visit is then used to spam targeted ads onto other sites that those users use; including Facebook.

That means Google’s search ads tend to appear in more places, taking in more data that can be useful for advertisers. That’s a huge problem for Meta in the long term, especially if more advertisers switch to Google search ads.

Unlike Meta, Google is not heavily dependent on Apple for user data. Mr. Wehner said it was likely that Google had “far more third-party data for measurement and optimization purposes” than Meta’s ad platform; which basically is another way of saying they can get third-party user data from anywhere a user is active online. Whereas, Facebook don't have the same reach or tools to compete on the same level.

5. TikTok and Reels present a conundrum.

For more than a year, Mr. Zuckerberg has pointed to how formidable TikTok has been as a foe. The Chinese-backed app has grown to more than a billion users on the back of its highly shareable and strangely addictive short video posts. And it is fiercely competing with Meta’s Instagram for eyeballs and attention.

Meta has cloned TikTok with a video product feature called Instagram Reels. Mr. Zuckerberg said recently that Reels, which is prominently placed in people’s Instagram feeds, was currently the No. 1 driver of engagement across the app.

The problem is that while Reels may be attracting users, it doesn’t make money as effectively as Instagram’s other features, like Stories and the main feed.

Most people are fed up with being spammed with 3 or more advertisements from the Instagram video rip off feature. Users are more likely to skip past the annoying spammed ads, which means it’s harder for Facebook to make money from them.

7. Spending on the metaverse is bonkers.

Mr. Zuckerberg believes so much that the internet’s next generation is the metaverse — a still fuzzy and theoretical concept that involves people moving across different virtual- and augmented-reality worlds — that he is willing to spend big on it.

So big that the spending amounted to more than $10 billion last year. Mr. Zuckerberg expects to spend even more in the future.

Yet there is no evidence the bet will pay off. Unlike Facebook’s shift to mobile devices in 2012, virtual reality use is still the province of niche hobbyists and has yet to really break into the mainstream. Widespread augmented-reality headsets are also months — if not years — away.

In essence, Mr. Zuckerberg is asking employees, users and investors to have faith in him and his metaverse vision. That’s a big ask for something that will cost the company billions in the coming years and that may never come to fruition.

Is it ever really going to gain any traction with users; now that’s a big question? Given everything that’s happened over the past few years, users are less likely to trust Facebook; many are already being put off the idea of being plugged into a platform that has built a reputation of widely ignoring its users, and also censoring them.

7. The elephant in the room; antitrust looms over Meta.

The threat of regulators in Washington coming for Mr. Zuckerberg’s company is a headache that just won’t go away.

Meta faces multiple investigations, including from a newly aggressive Federal Trade Commission and multiple state attorneys general, into whether it acted in an anti-competitive manner. Lawmakers have also coalesced around congressional efforts to pass antitrust bills.

Mr. Zuckerberg has argued that Meta is not a social networking monopoly. He has pointed furiously to what he calls “unprecedented levels of competition,” including from TikTok, Apple, Google and other future opponents.

But the threat of antitrust action has made it more difficult for Meta to buy its way into new social networking trends. In the past, Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp with little scrutiny as those services gained billions of users. Now even some of Meta’s seemingly less contentious acquisitions in virtual reality and GIFs have been challenged by regulators globally.

Facebook's change in direction may have been beneficial for its investors in the short term, though it appears as though they will soon be selling them down the river; subsequently, the FTC will look the other way with both Google and Apple and their Anti-Trust violations, and focus solely on Facebook as the platform is no longer beneficial or lucrative for its investors.