Meta had an earnings call this week. Revenues and profit are down. The metaverse division lost $2.8 billion in a single quarter. And Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, regarding the payroll, that there are “probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.” Here’s why that’s bad news for people using Facebook…
In about a month, Trump will no longer be president. He’ll no longer have the “political leader” exception on social media — he’ll have to play by the same rules as everyone else. I’ll game out what’s likely to happen as social networks and others consider “deplatforming” the ex-president. How deplatforming works All technology companies…
The attorneys general of 46 states, plus DC, filed a federal antitrust suit against Facebook yesterday. The same day, the Federal Trade Commission announced a separate suit alleging anti-competitive practices. I think these suits will be hard to prove, and any remedies won’t fix the bigger problems with Facebook’s abuse of data and damage to…
Simply put: social networks like Facebook are contributing to the polarization of American politics. The solution is not to break them up. The solution is to require them to expose members to a diversity of viewpoints. Why is America so divided? Why, even now, are there partisans so desperately afraid of Biden’s election that they…
A battle is waging between humanity’s evil side and the cleverness of Silicon Valley social network engineers. The evil side is winning. And it will always win. The Verge published some insightful articles on this topic in the last few weeks. Casey Newton published the second in a series of exposés on the outsourced operations…
Somebody posted a database of 49 million Instagram influencers where anyone could see it. This event says more about the stupidity of the term “influencer” than it does about breaches and leaks. According to TechCrunch, the database originated with Mumbai-based Chtrbox, a marketing firm that pays influencers to post things. Each record included the number…