May 24, 2024 • 37 mins
For three years, Facebook's monthly active users have been declining dramatically, with Facebook.com losing 397 million unique monthly visitors since May 2021. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how Mark Zuckerberg's abominable growth-at-all-costs mindset has turned Facebook into a dystopia of AI-generated slop, dangerous misinformation and outright pornography, all as a result of Zuckerberg's intentionally harmful approach to social media.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
All Zone Media. Hello, welcome to Better Offline. I'm your
host ed ze Trunk. Last episode, I walked you through
how Mark Zuckerberg and his top people intentionally ruined Facebook
(00:26):
and have been doing the same thing with Instagram. Which
you're probably wondering is what the net effects of that are,
and they're not great. In the first quarter of twenty
twenty four, Meta made thirty six point four y five
billion dollars, of which twelve point three seven billion dollars
was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily
active users, it now uses another metric, family daily active people.
(00:51):
This number, which could also be the name of a gym,
refers to registered and logged in users of one or
more of Facebook's family products who visited at least one
of these products on a particular day. This, again seemingly
innocent change to how Facebook reports growth, is quite significant
in that Facebook will no longer have to report its
(01:11):
daily or monthly active users, meaning that the only source
of truth in Meta's growth story is an extremely vague
growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything,
Though Meta doesn't really explain this number anywhere. Three billion
daily active people across Meta's family could combine WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook,
Facebook Messager, Facebook portal, Oculus, threads, and maybe some other
(01:36):
dead Facebook product that they've forgot to kill off of
the app store. I'm not really sure, and it's not
like they tell us. What's confusing is that in their
fourth quarter twenty twenty three earnings, Meta reported that it
had two point one one billion daily active users across
its properties, a number that is somehow distinct from the
three point one to nine billion family daily active of
(02:00):
people that they reported in the same quarter. Daily active
users is a fairly simple metric. It's how many people
engage with a product in a given day on average,
across the month or the quarter, I guess. But daily
family active people is a number that's somehow so distinct
that it's a billion users higher. It smells. It smells
(02:20):
like doodoo to me. I'll digress. When a company starts
playing these weird games with how they report user activity,
something's going very, very wrong. In general, when a company
tries to obfuscate the true numbers about their revenue, growth
or profit, it's one of the worst science and Enron
is probably the best example of it, with the company's
(02:41):
notorious use of esoteric metrics in their quarterly financial statements,
being used to disguise the fact that they were overleveraged, dysfunctional,
hemorrhaging money. While I don't really want to draw the
comparisons between Meta and Enron, there's an undeniable truth in
the adage that if you have nothing to hide, you
have nothing to fear. Healthy, stable, functional companies. They don't
(03:03):
feel the need to move the goalposts or create new
weird metrics. They just don't. It's a very very bad sign.
Between the first quarter of twenty twenty one and the
fourth quarter of twenty twenty three, which was the last
one where reported metrics actually came from Meta, the company
would increase its daily active users by two hundred and
thirty million and its monthly active users by two hundred
(03:24):
and twenty million. That's a growth ray of just under
eleven percent in daily actives and just over a seven
percent increase in monthly actives in three years. In that
time period, Meta launched its Horizon Metaverse and its Twitter
competitor Threads, which it claimed in its Q four earnings
in twenty twenty three had hit one hundred and thirty
million monthly active users, which was an increase of thirty
(03:47):
percent over the third quarter. Yet between the third and
fourth quarters, Metas overall monthly active users across their platforms
only increased by around twenty million, and this heavily suggests
that despite adding over one hundred million new monthly active
users on the property, it's shedding tens of millions of
them everywhere. Meta's entire product strategy revolves around growth of
(04:11):
these arbitrary metrics time spent on app engagement, meaningful time
spent all numbers that have dictated their strategy across a
multitude of properties like Facebook and Instagram for years. And
thanks to these really nasty growth tactics and a sheer
force of capital and monopolies, Meta has grown a pretty
much unstoppable position in social networking, controlling two of the
(04:34):
major platforms Instagram and Facebook, and two prevalent messaging services
in WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Yet Meta has become a
company that just shows contempt for users, and they turn
their products Facebook and Instagram in particular, into these horrible
algorithmic nightmares that undermine their core purpose. They don't connect people,
They intentionally allow malignant actors like anti vaxxers and spammers
(04:57):
to thrive on there, and they make it harder to
see the things that you want to see. To send
these arbitrary mentricks upwards, Mark Zuckerberg, he lied. He lied
to investors when he told them that his company doesn't
build services to make money, but makes money to build
better services, because for over a decade, metter has allowed
its services to decay while actively monetizing the frustration, paying
(05:20):
and confusion created by the horror show that is Meta.
When you look at Instagram or Facebook, I want you
to look a them a little different For me, just
for a moment. I want to view them not a
social networks, but as a kind of anthropological experimentation. Every
(05:40):
single thing you see on either of these platforms is
built or selected to make you spend more time on
the app and see more things that Meta wants you
to see, like ads or sponsored contents or suggested groups
that you can interact with, and in doing so, you're
increasing your time spent on the app and increasing the
amount of meaningful interactions you have with the content. Now,
(06:01):
what's important there is You'll notice I'm not saying anything
about you enjoying it or liking it or being able
to get to stuff or anything about a service. That's
because that isn't why it's there. Indeed, I want you
to realize that anything bad or frustrating you see on
the platform is a direct symptom of Mark Zuckerbug's unwillingness
to rate, limit, or really moderate the platform. Logically speaking,
(06:25):
one would think the meta would want you to have
a high quality Facebook experience, and they'd want to prove
in content that I don't know, I might be in
cindiary spammy, scammy, unhelpful or at the very least from
someone you know and want to hear from. But when
you only concern is growth, content moderation is more of
an emergency measure or just something you talk about in
(06:47):
earnings or in front of Congress. And to be clear,
this is all part of metas cultural DNA. In an
interview with journalist Jeff Horwitz in his book Broken Code,
Facebook's VP of Ads and Partnerships Brian Bowland, said that
building things is way more fun than making things secure
and safe, and until there's a regulatory or press fire,
you don't deal with them. Horwitz also cites that metas
(07:10):
engineer's greatest frustration was that the company perpetually needed something
to fail, often fucking spectacularly, and that is a quote
to drive interest in fixing it. Horwitz's Brooke describes Meta's
approach to moderation as having a light touch, considering it
a moral virtue, and that the company wasn't failing to
supervise what users did. It was neutral. As I briefly explained,
(07:33):
the logic here is that the more stuff there is
on Facebook or Instagram, the more likely you are to
run into something you'll interact with, even if said interaction
is genuinely bad. Horwitz notes that in April twenty sixteen,
Meta analyzed Facebook's most successful political groups, finding that a
third of them routinely featured content that was racist and
conspiracy minded, with their growth heavily driven by Facebook's group
(07:56):
you should Join and discover features algorithmic tools that face
used to recommend content. The researcher in question added that
sixty four percent of all extremist group joins are due
to Facebook's recommendation tools. Now here's something that will really
annoy you. At least they annoyed me. When the researcher
in question took their concerns to Facebook's Protect and Care team,
(08:17):
and that is their name. They were told that there
was nothing the team could do as and I quote,
the accounts creating the content were real people, and Facebook
intentionally had no rules mandating truth, balance or good faith. Cool.
That's the thing. Every time I read one of these things,
I just want to scream, because this is how this
(08:37):
company runs. There are many evil companies out there, but
it's so rare you read text that it's just like, yeah,
so if we do this, it will be good for people,
and someone just says, nah, mate, you don't want to
do that. Bring the numbers down. It's so strange and
it's so craven, and it's so often as well. And
this is only a tiny subset of the I imagine
tens of millions of emails at Meta. There's probably so
(09:00):
much worse that's going to come out one day. That
drives me insane. Ah. But I get back to the point,
which is that Meta at its core is a rot
economy empire, and it's entirely engineered to grow metrics and
revenue at pretty much the expense of anything else. In practice,
this means allowing almost any activity that might grow the
platform even if it means the groups balloon by tens
(09:22):
or hundreds of thousands of people a day, or allowing
people to friend fifty or more people in a single day,
even if it's obvious spam. It means allowing almost any
content other than that which it's legally required to police,
like mutilation or child pornography, which thank god they get
rid of. Fucked. I'm actually surprised that they take the
action there, and it's just it's very depressing, and even
(09:45):
in the worst cases, they're extremely hesitant to intervene. This
is why, by the way, when you log onto Facebook,
you can find multiple groups with the most bizarre names.
But I picked a particularly weird one search for Facebook complaints.
When you look, you'll find thousands of members in I
think like twenty different groups, all people that believe they're
(10:09):
talking to Facebook customer support, but what they're really doing
is engaging with the most obvious scammers in the world
asking to go private on Facebook Messenger. These groups are
a great example about Meta's total lack of any quality control,
and it's just utter contempt for their users. Typing Facebook
complaint into a search bar on the Facebook app should
(10:31):
if Meta gave a shit direct you I don't know
to Facebook's customer service department, and that would be if
one really existed, which it does not, which we will
get to later. Instead, it introduces you to multiple and
I've seen one. There's one group that had seventeen thousand,
one had five thousands. There's multiple groups with at least
a thousand people, and they're honey traps. They're obvious honeytraps
(10:55):
for scam artists, and Meta doesn't get rid of them,
I imagine because these groups have relatively high activity, boosting
Facebook's meaningful interactions, even if said interactions are a seventy
five year old being conned into sharing their username and
password via Facebook Messenger, or an irate Australian claiming that
hackers have changed his Facebook to Chinese, or another person
(11:15):
that I saw that was genuinely saying I ordered Lobster.
Where is it? I don't know on that one, mate,
I just don't know. Like most social networks, and you'll
see this with Twitter and Google in particular, even though
Google are realized not social network. In this case, these companies,
they have a kind of a black box approach to
customer service, meaning that when you submit or a complaint
or a problem or a query. Through these regular channels,
(11:38):
you're rarely going to get a substantive response or any
help of any kind. What makes Meta unique is that
they actively monetize the problem. In March twenty twenty three,
Meta launched paid verification, charging users fifteen dollars a month
to get a verified badge on their account, exclusive stickers
as well, and I quote as direct access to customer support,
(12:00):
which really has You've got to wonder, Hey, what does
Facebook think they're providing Otherwise is it not Facebook doing
their support? I'm just guessing, man, because it's not like
it's O the bloody website. It's just very annoying. It's
very annoying, and it's very It turns my stomach, it
really does. It's because customer support should be just a given,
(12:22):
especially when you're a company that makes tens of well
over ten billion dollars of profit a quarter. It's really frustrating,
and as shameless as it is, it's also just profoundly unimaginative.
As I've argued in the past, both on this podcast
and in my newsletter. By the way, Mark Zuckerberg is
a man bereft of ideas, Meta is a company bereft
(12:44):
of ideas. They stole Twitter's pivot, they stole Elon Musk's
paid verification idea, which in its first few moments allowed
pranksters to impersonate multi billion dollar pharmaceutical multinationals and white
billions from their stock valuation. And it just kind of
shows Meta's willingness to scrape from the bottom of the barrel,
(13:05):
even if it's just an horrible idea and also just
a very noxious one, like, yeah, we'll help you, mate,
if you pay fifteen dollars a month for our website
that we heavily monetize to such an extent that you
can barely get anything done on it. Good lord. But
as I've kind of suggested for Meta, any group is
an opportunity for engagement, and any content is an opportunity
(13:27):
for engagement, and any action taken on the platform is
a meaningful one. Anything that keeps a person engaged with
Instagram or Facebook, even if it's bad for the user,
is a good thing, and that mentality pervades the entirety
of this asshole company. To quote Facebook VP Andrew bos
Bosworth in a memo from twenty sixteen, and boz is
(13:48):
now the CTO of Meta. By the way, anything that
allows this company to connect more people more often is
de facto good, and all the work that this company
does in growth is justified, including questionable will contact, importing practices,
and subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends
by which he meant terms and condition changes. While Mark
(14:08):
Zuckerberg might have claimed that Meta never believe the ends
justify the means when this memo came out, and when
BuzzFeed asked him and stop him from making Bosworth metas
CTO in twenty twenty two, or for that matter, from
doing anything else nakedly evil Meta's growth at all cost.
(14:35):
Mindset means that both Facebook and Instagram incentivize the creation
of more stuff far more than they incentivize any kind
of meaningful interaction of any kind. And as I've mentioned previously,
both of them have algorithms that aggressively force sponsored and
suggested content onto users based on this unknowable leviathan of
data points. One particularly noxious engagement trick Facebook uses is
(14:59):
to show a our cell of reels short vertical videos,
but instead of playing the entire thing, you're shown a
two or three second loop of the content In the
hopes that you'll be intrigued enough to click. This kind
of design decision is entirely built to create more engagement.
Meta could just play the videos in their entirety and
let you view them and maybe click through and hear
the sound if you are interested. But Facebook is built
(15:21):
to please Mark zuckerbergen his nasty, dirty little numbers game.
It's gross. Yet by incentivizing as much content and as
many interactions as possible, rather than curating the experience in
any way, Facebook is being killed. It's being destroyed in
real time. A study out of Stamford and Georgetown University
(15:43):
found that AI generated images have begun to dominate Facebook,
garnering hundreds of millions of interactions thanks to Meta's recommendation algorithms,
with one AI generated image becoming one of the twenty
most viewed pieces of content in the third quarter of
twenty twenty three. These pages, according to the study, regularly
and I quote used clickbake tactics and attempted to direct
(16:04):
users to off platform content farms and low quality debates
and scam pages that attempted to sell products that do
not exist or to get users to divulge personal details.
I don't know if you remember in the previous episode,
but I mentioned that Facebook has made changes like this before,
promoting clickbait content that doesn't tell you what it is
really until you click it. In essence, Mayre's algorithm is
(16:26):
actively monetizing, sending users to questionable groups that, according to
the study, used known deceptive practices such as as count,
theft or takeover to spread these horrible images, and that
these accounts exhibited suspicious follower growth showing them ads through
the entire experience. Four h four Media's Jason Koebler also
(16:46):
analyzed the phenomena and found that groups were using AI
altered pictures of Simon Cowell to direct people toward a
page called Thoughts, which routinely encourage people to click through
to a spamming website called Planet tree Panetee, which was
in turn full of horrible, invasive ads. Cobler also found
that Planet and Thoughts dramatic growth began when they started
(17:09):
using these AI generated images, and that many other groups
were doing the same thing, and they were generating these
bizarre images like a picture of Jesus made of shrimp
or an AI generated picture of a one hundred and twenty
one year old woman celebrating her birthday and this image,
by the way, her eyes are like smudges. It does
not look real. But these AI generated image they're running
(17:31):
absolutely rampant on the platform. All bookers. Meta has absolutely
no duty towards their users or even the platform itself.
Four o four Media also reported recently that Facebook's recommendation
algorithm is now promoting anime pornography, combining a mixture of
AI generated cartoon porn and plagiarized artwork to garner tens
(17:51):
of thousands of likes and reports to Jason Koebler mentioned
that a user complained that they'd been shown nude pictures
of Disney princesses and Misty from Pokemon. This is particularly
grotesque when you realize how many children use Facebook. Although
Facebook's relevance has kind of waned with gen z and younger,
it's still a major social network property in this demographic.
(18:14):
A report from twenty twenty one found that forty five
percent of kids under the age of thirteen used Facebook daily,
and speaks to a larger trend of recklessness within this company.
Going back to when an engineer was fired after raising
concerns that Facebook's people you may know feature allowed and
I quote millions of pedophiles to target tens of millions
of children. I guess Meta just doesn't really give a
(18:37):
shit as long as the number goes up. It doesn't
matter that Facebook's algorithm is actively recommending AI generated images
of mutilated children, garning hundreds of thousands, if not millions,
of engagements. It's also that Facebook can serve your ads
next to them. It doesn't matter that Facebook is saturated
with engagement bait, much of it created with generative AI,
(18:58):
because Meta is able to express it has three billion
or more family daily active people, whatever the hell that
means on the platform, even if it means that these
three billion daily active people, and I really question whether
it's actually three billion people, even if they're watching this
thing fall apart in real time. Yeah. Arguably the most
(19:19):
confusing addition to the platform in any recency is Meta AI,
a free and impossible to disable, by the way, artificial
intelligence assistant that uses generative AI to answer user questions
and generate images from virtually any Facebook property. Meta also
allows users to add metas AI to their groups, letting
(19:39):
commenters ask it questions. But they also did something really
weird they've allowed you to add it to the group
and respond to comments that aren't getting enough engagement, which
led metas Ai to respond to a comment in a
parenting group that it referring to metas ai had a
gifted child and recommended a specific school for help with
(20:00):
their child's needs. And when I say there, I'm referring
to a generative AI on the Facebook platform. It's so strange.
It's all so strange, And you know what, it doesn't
make any sense until you consider that every single decision
that Mark Zuckerberg makes is to keep users on metas platforms.
By adding a generative AI assistant, Meta gives users more
(20:22):
things to play with, more reasons to interact with the platform,
and more ways to generate content to put onto the platform,
which in turn creates more reasons for others to interact
with it. It doesn't matter that the things being created
are useless or harmful, or profoundly inane or intrusive or annoying,
(20:43):
or that by giving people the ability to lasily generate
posts which all kind of sound the same, because all
generative AI is trained on basically the same data sets,
except by the way Chacebooks is trained on Facebook data.
You're just going to normalize everything on there. Every Thing
already kind of sucks on Facebook, but now generative AI
(21:03):
will allow it to suck in greater numbers. This is
the future everyone now, this nonsensical act of pushing AI
onto Facebook and Instagram. Whats happened all these things? It's
just another silly, senseless way that Mark Zuckerberg is burning money,
and Meta is raising its spending forec US in twenty
twenty four to thirty five billion to forty five billion dollars,
(21:27):
which is up from thirty to thirty seven billion. Zuckerberg's
blown over forty billion dollars on the metaverse so far
and seems to be intent on doing the same thing
with AI. And he's going to sink billions more into
graphics processing units and other assorted hardware to spin up
features that nobody wants, that nobody asks for that Every
time I've seen someone discuss, they are saying something along
(21:50):
the lines of why is this here? Or why do
I need this? And I don't want this. I have
never seen such an unpopular product other than the meta us.
I think genuinely, had the metaverse been easier to access,
it would have been even more unpopular than this, but
let's be honest, it's already pretty unpopular already. Not to
sound too dramatic, but I believe that Meta is a
(22:12):
deeply evil company and it's run by people that treat
human beings as pawns. Pawns to increase engagement metrics and
make money on advertising. And what makes the company so
unique is that the services it provides are just unquestionably awful.
Using both Facebook and Instagram is a battle with an
algorithm to see the people that you choose to follow,
(22:33):
and Meta as a company seems incapable of developing anything new, intivative,
or even useful. Yet it made over thirty six billion
dollars in revenue in Q one twenty twenty four, and
it did so by abusing and manipulating its users while
also failing to maintain any integrity or utility within two
of the most important platforms on the Internet. And I believe,
(22:55):
as crazy as it sounds, that this strategy will lead
to the contraction and eventual death of face Book at
the very least, and possibly Instagram. And I anticipate that
as things get more difficult for the company, it's going
to hit Instagram so much worse. According to data provided
to me by Similar Web, in the last three years,
Facebook's US website audience has declined by thirteen point seven percent,
(23:17):
and in the year of a year period from April
twenty twenty three to twenty twenty four, monthly active users
on Facebook's app have declined by two point two percent,
while Instagram's web aardy inscrewed by twenty three percent over
the last few years. In the last twelve months, its
growth has slowed to six point eight percent, and between
March and April twenty twenty four, Instagram's app monthly active
(23:38):
users in America declined by zero point eight percent. Instagram's
the cash cow. This is the thing to be worried about. Mark.
Facebook's monthly active users have been aggressively declining every month, though,
tumbling from a high of two hundred and eight million
monthly active users in May twenty twenty one to one
hundred and sixty one million monthly active users in April
(23:58):
twenty twenty four. Just to be clear, talking about the
website there, and that's the second lowest the number has
been in the entire period, beaten only by February twenty
twenty four, when it had one hundred and fifty eight
point eight million active users. On top of that year
of a year, Facebook's apps are a decline of two
point two percent in monthly active users. To put it simply,
(24:19):
Facebook's decaying, and they've lost nearly fifty million monthly active
users in the last three year in the US to
their website. Globally, things are a lot worse. Facebook has
lost twenty five point two percent of its monthly unique
website visitors since twenty twenty one, crashing from a high
of one point four five six billion in May twenty
(24:40):
twenty one to a low of one point oh four
billion in February twenty twenty four, slightly increasing to one
point five billion in April twenty twenty four, a loss
of three hundred and ninety seven million unique monthly visitors.
One has to wonder if these numbers might have been
what pushed Zuckerberg to try and turn the metaverse into
and I quote, the next generation of the Internet. Maybe
(25:03):
he knew, Maybe he knew that his disgraceful, lazy, half
baked abus of shitty, morally reprehensible approach to building social
networks was one that had a sell by date. Everything
you see on Facebook and Instagram today is a monument
to the works of a man that sees users as
rats in a digital maze built to make numbers go
up and investors happy. And I don't even think he
(25:26):
cares that much about investors. After all, he can't be fired.
I've seemed very angry in these episodes. I'm not telling
you how to feel. I'm just telling you how I feel.
(25:47):
And a lot of this comes down to a deep
frustration with Facebook and Instagram and Meta as a company,
because when you see a company with so much talent,
with so much influence, with so much responsibility, and you
see how little responsibility they feel to the people that
use their websites, it's just disgusting, especially when even the
(26:08):
slightest changes could make these websites so much better. Maybe
a little less profitable, but after all, this company makes
over ten billion dollars in profit a quarter, kind of
like Google. Hey, I should do an episode on those people.
Maybe I will in the future, But in all seriousness,
what Meta stands for right now is rot and what
(26:29):
Mark Zuckerberg stands for is evil. You know, it's just
society's mechanisms. They're far too slow and they lack the
precision to deal with a man like Mark Zuckerberg. And
he's a man that acts with just this shocking lack
of morality and I find it putrid. And this complex
machine he's used to torture humans for profit and power,
it's gone completely unchecked. A lot of government handwaving, but
(26:53):
no real changes. The best hope we have is the EU.
And as I mentioned before, Mark Zuckerberg he can never
be fired. We are stuck with him, and he can
and he will run this company into the goddamn ground
and he will hurt people on the way to doing it. Well,
Elon Musk, And just to be clear, he is a greedy, churlish, nasty, freakish, disgusting,
(27:18):
shameful man, Mark Zuckerberg is just something entirely different. He's
not stupid, he really isn't. And unlike Musk, he hasn't
seemed to have any compulsion for anyone to like him.
They occasionally put him in a chain or a normal
person outfit, or have him do barbecue to try and
pretend he's human. Eh. He seems kind of half hearted
(27:39):
in it. I can understand that, because that's not what
turns Mark Zuckerberg on I'm not making any suggestions about
sexual proclivities. Please do not sue me. What I'm saying
is Mark Zuckerberg craves numerical dominance, and he craves it
at any cost. He must force human beings to use Facebook,
and once they're there, he must make them move in
a way that he wishes and do the things he wishes.
(28:01):
Also that he can see the number go up. Mark
Zuckerberg will do whatever he wants because he built a
system so that he could never be fired, giving him
unilateral power over a monopoly he designed to chew through
people's lives, turning them into fuel for Meta's money machine,
and so he could get his rocks off looking at
and the numbers go up. Make no mistake, what Mark
(28:24):
Zuckerberg has done is monstrous, both in its damage to
society and its financial opulence. Facebook has made so many
people so rich in so many ways, and offered a
genuine societal service, and then it found every foreseeable way
to monetize every corner of our goddamn lives. Facebook's culture
is one of imprisonment and abuse, and it traps users
(28:47):
in engagement loops that tangibly harm them, something that Facebook
is both well aware of and intentionally not seeking to remedy.
And ultimately the software itself, the software behind Facebook, which
does have value in it in how it connects so
many people in so many ways. That software is a
prisoner of Mark Zuckerberg, who may or may not have
stolen the idea in the first place, making it just
(29:10):
another piece of data he's extracted through deeply shitty means.
At one point, Facebook was a social good, something that
contributed to meaningful connections between human beings separated by time
and geography. During the Arab Spring, protesters in Cairo held
up banners that read, in a mixture of English and Arabic,
thank you Facebook. Similar sentiments a daubed on to the
(29:33):
wall of the headquarters of Tunisia's Ministery of the Interior,
reflecting its role as a facilitator and a neutral communications network. Facebook,
even as leaked emails obtained by The Daily Beast revealed,
placed protests pages under special protection with a team providing
twenty four to seven monitoring that, by the way, was
in the past. At least in this regard, Facebook seemed
(29:54):
to understand its role in the world and was prepared
to kind of step up and own it. It refused
to bend the knee to Hosney Mubbarak and its horrible regime,
and on January twenty fifth, twenty eleven, was banned by
the Egyptian government two days before it shut down the
entire Internet. People used VPNs to get back on it,
but still Facebook used to mean something. Today, Facebook is
(30:16):
an example of everything wrong with the Internet and howgorithmic
iron maiden that nakedly cons users every minute, a parasite
that deprives creators of their audiences and users of their industry.
Facebook has no principles or backbone, and it's no longer
a reliable tool for connecting people as it once was
during the pro democracy protests I previously mentioned. Whereas once
(30:39):
you could have made a plausible case that even underneath
its flaws, Facebook had an ember of morality, a smidgeon
of a care, It gave a tiny bit of a fuck.
It's just no longer a coherent position. In a just world, Facebook, Instagram,
all metaproperties would be public utilities instead of becoming this
(31:00):
weird algorithmic fixation of a very strange multi billionaire weirdo. Sorry,
I shouldn't have called Mark Zuckerberger weirdo. You're right, that
just isn't harsh enough. Mark Zuckerberg is a goddamn monster.
Mark Zuckerberg is the opposite of what the tech industry
should stand for. He's a monopolist that deliberately makes and
(31:22):
proliferates bad software, and he makes the world worse for it.
Facebook and Instagram are insults to every single software engineer
in the world. Built to trick and swindle UNHRM rather
than provide any service. What Facebook and Instagram have become
is an insult to Silicon Valley. I may come off
as a pessimist sometime, but I'm actually a broken hearted romantic.
(31:45):
There was a time that Facebook had a measurable, meaningful,
and good effect on my life and billions of other
people's lives. There was a time this company had something
behind it. And even then, when I say this, I
realized two thousand and eights, when people you may know
went in, maybe it was always this bad, maybe they
were better at hiding it. But I'm not pessimistic about
(32:06):
this company because I want to be. I'm not even
a pessimist. I'm a fucking cynic. I'm a cynic because
I've read these documents. I've seen the way that this
company talks about the users. I've seen the way that
Mark Zuckerberg has deliberately hurt them. I've seen them make
changes or choose not to make changes in the case
of Project Daisy, because they wanted to keep things growing,
(32:27):
and they've done so in a way that's made so
many horrible assholes so rich, and so many millions and
billions of people miserable. And Mark Zuckerberg is the reason.
He is the person that puts out some of the
most popular and poorly made software in existence, and he
does so in a way that will continue to hurt
people until this company dies or until he's somehow removed, which,
(32:51):
as I've mentioned, is not possible. People in the tech industry,
people in society as well, should exile Zuckerberg. He should
not be welcomed in the circles of Silicon Valley. He
shouldn't be welcomed anywhere. This man owns a large chunk
of Hawaii. Make him piss off there and live alone,
or what you can live with this family obviously. Nevertheless,
(33:14):
this man, he may not be a criminal, but he
is a scumbag. He is a person that has deliberately
made things worse so that he can be richer, so
that he can see a number go up. He is
the rot Emperor, and he deserves no good, he deserves
(33:35):
no happiness, and he deserves to have this platform taken
away from him. But it's never gonna happen. We don't
have the government mechanisms to have someone like Mark Zuckerberg
remove from power. And because Sean Parker so desperately protected
Mark Zuckerberg's right to control everything, this is what you get.
This is actually what a true horrifying monopoly does. It
(33:56):
hurts people, It manipulates people. It makes the worst people rich,
and regular people poorer and sadder and more confused and
more lost and more disconnected and more unaware of the
world around them. It spreads conspiracies, It spread's lunacy, It
makes people unhappy, and it does so that so that
(34:17):
Mark Zuckerberg can add another fucking zero to another fucking
bank account. And it turns my goddamn stomach. And I'm sorry,
I realized across these episodes, I have been on one.
I have been quite angry, I have been full of fury.
I'm sorry if that isn't the right way to approach this,
And I've really done my best to come at this
(34:38):
from a researched and thoughtful perspective as well. But reading
this stuff has just so deeply angered me. It's so
deeply offended me. I did not know that tech companies
could be this craven. Or maybe I did, but I
was kind of in denial. I don't know. But in
reporting this, I have just been disgusted. And I've said
(35:04):
stomach churning at your turning or whatever it is a
few times, and it's true, though it is disgusting, I
actually love tech. I love this stuff. I find it
intellectually interesting. Take was how I got this job and
many jobs before it. Tech was something that meant something.
It was something about building great software and great hardware,
(35:25):
ways to connect people, make people able to do more things.
What Mark Zuckerberg stands for is a deep nihilism in tech,
where it isn't about building better things or connecting more people,
where it isn't about making the world better or more
aware or more educated, or giving them more access to
more things. No, it's about decay. It's about rot. It's
(35:51):
about growing nothing from nothing, again and again, and now
Facebook and Instagram are poisoned with generative AI bullshit thanks
to Mark Zuckerberg, a man with no creativity other than
that which makes people dance for him to increase numbers.
This man is a goddamn disgrace and his company is
a disgrace too. The world deserves better than Mark Zuckerberg.
(36:16):
Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
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is Matttersowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com, m A T
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(36:40):
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(37:04):
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts
All Zone Media. Hello, welcome to Better Offline. I'm your
host ed ze Trunk. Last episode, I walked you through
how Mark Zuckerberg and his top people intentionally ruined Facebook
(00:26):
and have been doing the same thing with Instagram. Which
you're probably wondering is what the net effects of that are,
and they're not great. In the first quarter of twenty
twenty four, Meta made thirty six point four y five
billion dollars, of which twelve point three seven billion dollars
was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily
active users, it now uses another metric, family daily active people.
(00:51):
This number, which could also be the name of a gym,
refers to registered and logged in users of one or
more of Facebook's family products who visited at least one
of these products on a particular day. This, again seemingly
innocent change to how Facebook reports growth, is quite significant
in that Facebook will no longer have to report its
(01:11):
daily or monthly active users, meaning that the only source
of truth in Meta's growth story is an extremely vague
growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything,
Though Meta doesn't really explain this number anywhere. Three billion
daily active people across Meta's family could combine WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook,
Facebook Messager, Facebook portal, Oculus, threads, and maybe some other
(01:36):
dead Facebook product that they've forgot to kill off of
the app store. I'm not really sure, and it's not
like they tell us. What's confusing is that in their
fourth quarter twenty twenty three earnings, Meta reported that it
had two point one one billion daily active users across
its properties, a number that is somehow distinct from the
three point one to nine billion family daily active of
(02:00):
people that they reported in the same quarter. Daily active
users is a fairly simple metric. It's how many people
engage with a product in a given day on average,
across the month or the quarter, I guess. But daily
family active people is a number that's somehow so distinct
that it's a billion users higher. It smells. It smells
(02:20):
like doodoo to me. I'll digress. When a company starts
playing these weird games with how they report user activity,
something's going very, very wrong. In general, when a company
tries to obfuscate the true numbers about their revenue, growth
or profit, it's one of the worst science and Enron
is probably the best example of it, with the company's
(02:41):
notorious use of esoteric metrics in their quarterly financial statements,
being used to disguise the fact that they were overleveraged, dysfunctional,
hemorrhaging money. While I don't really want to draw the
comparisons between Meta and Enron, there's an undeniable truth in
the adage that if you have nothing to hide, you
have nothing to fear. Healthy, stable, functional companies. They don't
(03:03):
feel the need to move the goalposts or create new
weird metrics. They just don't. It's a very very bad sign.
Between the first quarter of twenty twenty one and the
fourth quarter of twenty twenty three, which was the last
one where reported metrics actually came from Meta, the company
would increase its daily active users by two hundred and
thirty million and its monthly active users by two hundred
(03:24):
and twenty million. That's a growth ray of just under
eleven percent in daily actives and just over a seven
percent increase in monthly actives in three years. In that
time period, Meta launched its Horizon Metaverse and its Twitter
competitor Threads, which it claimed in its Q four earnings
in twenty twenty three had hit one hundred and thirty
million monthly active users, which was an increase of thirty
(03:47):
percent over the third quarter. Yet between the third and
fourth quarters, Metas overall monthly active users across their platforms
only increased by around twenty million, and this heavily suggests
that despite adding over one hundred million new monthly active
users on the property, it's shedding tens of millions of
them everywhere. Meta's entire product strategy revolves around growth of
(04:11):
these arbitrary metrics time spent on app engagement, meaningful time
spent all numbers that have dictated their strategy across a
multitude of properties like Facebook and Instagram for years. And
thanks to these really nasty growth tactics and a sheer
force of capital and monopolies, Meta has grown a pretty
much unstoppable position in social networking, controlling two of the
(04:34):
major platforms Instagram and Facebook, and two prevalent messaging services
in WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Yet Meta has become a
company that just shows contempt for users, and they turn
their products Facebook and Instagram in particular, into these horrible
algorithmic nightmares that undermine their core purpose. They don't connect people,
They intentionally allow malignant actors like anti vaxxers and spammers
(04:57):
to thrive on there, and they make it harder to
see the things that you want to see. To send
these arbitrary mentricks upwards, Mark Zuckerberg, he lied. He lied
to investors when he told them that his company doesn't
build services to make money, but makes money to build
better services, because for over a decade, metter has allowed
its services to decay while actively monetizing the frustration, paying
(05:20):
and confusion created by the horror show that is Meta.
When you look at Instagram or Facebook, I want you
to look a them a little different For me, just
for a moment. I want to view them not a
social networks, but as a kind of anthropological experimentation. Every
(05:40):
single thing you see on either of these platforms is
built or selected to make you spend more time on
the app and see more things that Meta wants you
to see, like ads or sponsored contents or suggested groups
that you can interact with, and in doing so, you're
increasing your time spent on the app and increasing the
amount of meaningful interactions you have with the content. Now,
(06:01):
what's important there is You'll notice I'm not saying anything
about you enjoying it or liking it or being able
to get to stuff or anything about a service. That's
because that isn't why it's there. Indeed, I want you
to realize that anything bad or frustrating you see on
the platform is a direct symptom of Mark Zuckerbug's unwillingness
to rate, limit, or really moderate the platform. Logically speaking,
(06:25):
one would think the meta would want you to have
a high quality Facebook experience, and they'd want to prove
in content that I don't know, I might be in
cindiary spammy, scammy, unhelpful or at the very least from
someone you know and want to hear from. But when
you only concern is growth, content moderation is more of
an emergency measure or just something you talk about in
(06:47):
earnings or in front of Congress. And to be clear,
this is all part of metas cultural DNA. In an
interview with journalist Jeff Horwitz in his book Broken Code,
Facebook's VP of Ads and Partnerships Brian Bowland, said that
building things is way more fun than making things secure
and safe, and until there's a regulatory or press fire,
you don't deal with them. Horwitz also cites that metas
(07:10):
engineer's greatest frustration was that the company perpetually needed something
to fail, often fucking spectacularly, and that is a quote
to drive interest in fixing it. Horwitz's Brooke describes Meta's
approach to moderation as having a light touch, considering it
a moral virtue, and that the company wasn't failing to
supervise what users did. It was neutral. As I briefly explained,
(07:33):
the logic here is that the more stuff there is
on Facebook or Instagram, the more likely you are to
run into something you'll interact with, even if said interaction
is genuinely bad. Horwitz notes that in April twenty sixteen,
Meta analyzed Facebook's most successful political groups, finding that a
third of them routinely featured content that was racist and
conspiracy minded, with their growth heavily driven by Facebook's group
(07:56):
you should Join and discover features algorithmic tools that face
used to recommend content. The researcher in question added that
sixty four percent of all extremist group joins are due
to Facebook's recommendation tools. Now here's something that will really
annoy you. At least they annoyed me. When the researcher
in question took their concerns to Facebook's Protect and Care team,
(08:17):
and that is their name. They were told that there
was nothing the team could do as and I quote,
the accounts creating the content were real people, and Facebook
intentionally had no rules mandating truth, balance or good faith. Cool.
That's the thing. Every time I read one of these things,
I just want to scream, because this is how this
(08:37):
company runs. There are many evil companies out there, but
it's so rare you read text that it's just like, yeah,
so if we do this, it will be good for people,
and someone just says, nah, mate, you don't want to
do that. Bring the numbers down. It's so strange and
it's so craven, and it's so often as well. And
this is only a tiny subset of the I imagine
tens of millions of emails at Meta. There's probably so
(09:00):
much worse that's going to come out one day. That
drives me insane. Ah. But I get back to the point,
which is that Meta at its core is a rot
economy empire, and it's entirely engineered to grow metrics and
revenue at pretty much the expense of anything else. In practice,
this means allowing almost any activity that might grow the
platform even if it means the groups balloon by tens
(09:22):
or hundreds of thousands of people a day, or allowing
people to friend fifty or more people in a single day,
even if it's obvious spam. It means allowing almost any
content other than that which it's legally required to police,
like mutilation or child pornography, which thank god they get
rid of. Fucked. I'm actually surprised that they take the
action there, and it's just it's very depressing, and even
(09:45):
in the worst cases, they're extremely hesitant to intervene. This
is why, by the way, when you log onto Facebook,
you can find multiple groups with the most bizarre names.
But I picked a particularly weird one search for Facebook complaints.
When you look, you'll find thousands of members in I
think like twenty different groups, all people that believe they're
(10:09):
talking to Facebook customer support, but what they're really doing
is engaging with the most obvious scammers in the world
asking to go private on Facebook Messenger. These groups are
a great example about Meta's total lack of any quality control,
and it's just utter contempt for their users. Typing Facebook
complaint into a search bar on the Facebook app should
(10:31):
if Meta gave a shit direct you I don't know
to Facebook's customer service department, and that would be if
one really existed, which it does not, which we will
get to later. Instead, it introduces you to multiple and
I've seen one. There's one group that had seventeen thousand,
one had five thousands. There's multiple groups with at least
a thousand people, and they're honey traps. They're obvious honeytraps
(10:55):
for scam artists, and Meta doesn't get rid of them,
I imagine because these groups have relatively high activity, boosting
Facebook's meaningful interactions, even if said interactions are a seventy
five year old being conned into sharing their username and
password via Facebook Messenger, or an irate Australian claiming that
hackers have changed his Facebook to Chinese, or another person
(11:15):
that I saw that was genuinely saying I ordered Lobster.
Where is it? I don't know on that one, mate,
I just don't know. Like most social networks, and you'll
see this with Twitter and Google in particular, even though
Google are realized not social network. In this case, these companies,
they have a kind of a black box approach to
customer service, meaning that when you submit or a complaint
or a problem or a query. Through these regular channels,
(11:38):
you're rarely going to get a substantive response or any
help of any kind. What makes Meta unique is that
they actively monetize the problem. In March twenty twenty three,
Meta launched paid verification, charging users fifteen dollars a month
to get a verified badge on their account, exclusive stickers
as well, and I quote as direct access to customer support,
(12:00):
which really has You've got to wonder, Hey, what does
Facebook think they're providing Otherwise is it not Facebook doing
their support? I'm just guessing, man, because it's not like
it's O the bloody website. It's just very annoying. It's
very annoying, and it's very It turns my stomach, it
really does. It's because customer support should be just a given,
(12:22):
especially when you're a company that makes tens of well
over ten billion dollars of profit a quarter. It's really frustrating,
and as shameless as it is, it's also just profoundly unimaginative.
As I've argued in the past, both on this podcast
and in my newsletter. By the way, Mark Zuckerberg is
a man bereft of ideas, Meta is a company bereft
(12:44):
of ideas. They stole Twitter's pivot, they stole Elon Musk's
paid verification idea, which in its first few moments allowed
pranksters to impersonate multi billion dollar pharmaceutical multinationals and white
billions from their stock valuation. And it just kind of
shows Meta's willingness to scrape from the bottom of the barrel,
(13:05):
even if it's just an horrible idea and also just
a very noxious one, like, yeah, we'll help you, mate,
if you pay fifteen dollars a month for our website
that we heavily monetize to such an extent that you
can barely get anything done on it. Good lord. But
as I've kind of suggested for Meta, any group is
an opportunity for engagement, and any content is an opportunity
(13:27):
for engagement, and any action taken on the platform is
a meaningful one. Anything that keeps a person engaged with
Instagram or Facebook, even if it's bad for the user,
is a good thing, and that mentality pervades the entirety
of this asshole company. To quote Facebook VP Andrew bos
Bosworth in a memo from twenty sixteen, and boz is
(13:48):
now the CTO of Meta. By the way, anything that
allows this company to connect more people more often is
de facto good, and all the work that this company
does in growth is justified, including questionable will contact, importing practices,
and subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends
by which he meant terms and condition changes. While Mark
(14:08):
Zuckerberg might have claimed that Meta never believe the ends
justify the means when this memo came out, and when
BuzzFeed asked him and stop him from making Bosworth metas
CTO in twenty twenty two, or for that matter, from
doing anything else nakedly evil Meta's growth at all cost.
(14:35):
Mindset means that both Facebook and Instagram incentivize the creation
of more stuff far more than they incentivize any kind
of meaningful interaction of any kind. And as I've mentioned previously,
both of them have algorithms that aggressively force sponsored and
suggested content onto users based on this unknowable leviathan of
data points. One particularly noxious engagement trick Facebook uses is
(14:59):
to show a our cell of reels short vertical videos,
but instead of playing the entire thing, you're shown a
two or three second loop of the content In the
hopes that you'll be intrigued enough to click. This kind
of design decision is entirely built to create more engagement.
Meta could just play the videos in their entirety and
let you view them and maybe click through and hear
the sound if you are interested. But Facebook is built
(15:21):
to please Mark zuckerbergen his nasty, dirty little numbers game.
It's gross. Yet by incentivizing as much content and as
many interactions as possible, rather than curating the experience in
any way, Facebook is being killed. It's being destroyed in
real time. A study out of Stamford and Georgetown University
(15:43):
found that AI generated images have begun to dominate Facebook,
garnering hundreds of millions of interactions thanks to Meta's recommendation algorithms,
with one AI generated image becoming one of the twenty
most viewed pieces of content in the third quarter of
twenty twenty three. These pages, according to the study, regularly
and I quote used clickbake tactics and attempted to direct
(16:04):
users to off platform content farms and low quality debates
and scam pages that attempted to sell products that do
not exist or to get users to divulge personal details.
I don't know if you remember in the previous episode,
but I mentioned that Facebook has made changes like this before,
promoting clickbait content that doesn't tell you what it is
really until you click it. In essence, Mayre's algorithm is
(16:26):
actively monetizing, sending users to questionable groups that, according to
the study, used known deceptive practices such as as count,
theft or takeover to spread these horrible images, and that
these accounts exhibited suspicious follower growth showing them ads through
the entire experience. Four h four Media's Jason Koebler also
(16:46):
analyzed the phenomena and found that groups were using AI
altered pictures of Simon Cowell to direct people toward a
page called Thoughts, which routinely encourage people to click through
to a spamming website called Planet tree Panetee, which was
in turn full of horrible, invasive ads. Cobler also found
that Planet and Thoughts dramatic growth began when they started
(17:09):
using these AI generated images, and that many other groups
were doing the same thing, and they were generating these
bizarre images like a picture of Jesus made of shrimp
or an AI generated picture of a one hundred and twenty
one year old woman celebrating her birthday and this image,
by the way, her eyes are like smudges. It does
not look real. But these AI generated image they're running
(17:31):
absolutely rampant on the platform. All bookers. Meta has absolutely
no duty towards their users or even the platform itself.
Four o four Media also reported recently that Facebook's recommendation
algorithm is now promoting anime pornography, combining a mixture of
AI generated cartoon porn and plagiarized artwork to garner tens
(17:51):
of thousands of likes and reports to Jason Koebler mentioned
that a user complained that they'd been shown nude pictures
of Disney princesses and Misty from Pokemon. This is particularly
grotesque when you realize how many children use Facebook. Although
Facebook's relevance has kind of waned with gen z and younger,
it's still a major social network property in this demographic.
(18:14):
A report from twenty twenty one found that forty five
percent of kids under the age of thirteen used Facebook daily,
and speaks to a larger trend of recklessness within this company.
Going back to when an engineer was fired after raising
concerns that Facebook's people you may know feature allowed and
I quote millions of pedophiles to target tens of millions
of children. I guess Meta just doesn't really give a
(18:37):
shit as long as the number goes up. It doesn't
matter that Facebook's algorithm is actively recommending AI generated images
of mutilated children, garning hundreds of thousands, if not millions,
of engagements. It's also that Facebook can serve your ads
next to them. It doesn't matter that Facebook is saturated
with engagement bait, much of it created with generative AI,
(18:58):
because Meta is able to express it has three billion
or more family daily active people, whatever the hell that
means on the platform, even if it means that these
three billion daily active people, and I really question whether
it's actually three billion people, even if they're watching this
thing fall apart in real time. Yeah. Arguably the most
(19:19):
confusing addition to the platform in any recency is Meta AI,
a free and impossible to disable, by the way, artificial
intelligence assistant that uses generative AI to answer user questions
and generate images from virtually any Facebook property. Meta also
allows users to add metas AI to their groups, letting
(19:39):
commenters ask it questions. But they also did something really
weird they've allowed you to add it to the group
and respond to comments that aren't getting enough engagement, which
led metas Ai to respond to a comment in a
parenting group that it referring to metas ai had a
gifted child and recommended a specific school for help with
(20:00):
their child's needs. And when I say there, I'm referring
to a generative AI on the Facebook platform. It's so strange.
It's all so strange, And you know what, it doesn't
make any sense until you consider that every single decision
that Mark Zuckerberg makes is to keep users on metas platforms.
By adding a generative AI assistant, Meta gives users more
(20:22):
things to play with, more reasons to interact with the platform,
and more ways to generate content to put onto the platform,
which in turn creates more reasons for others to interact
with it. It doesn't matter that the things being created
are useless or harmful, or profoundly inane or intrusive or annoying,
(20:43):
or that by giving people the ability to lasily generate
posts which all kind of sound the same, because all
generative AI is trained on basically the same data sets,
except by the way Chacebooks is trained on Facebook data.
You're just going to normalize everything on there. Every Thing
already kind of sucks on Facebook, but now generative AI
(21:03):
will allow it to suck in greater numbers. This is
the future everyone now, this nonsensical act of pushing AI
onto Facebook and Instagram. Whats happened all these things? It's
just another silly, senseless way that Mark Zuckerberg is burning money,
and Meta is raising its spending forec US in twenty
twenty four to thirty five billion to forty five billion dollars,
(21:27):
which is up from thirty to thirty seven billion. Zuckerberg's
blown over forty billion dollars on the metaverse so far
and seems to be intent on doing the same thing
with AI. And he's going to sink billions more into
graphics processing units and other assorted hardware to spin up
features that nobody wants, that nobody asks for that Every
time I've seen someone discuss, they are saying something along
(21:50):
the lines of why is this here? Or why do
I need this? And I don't want this. I have
never seen such an unpopular product other than the meta us.
I think genuinely, had the metaverse been easier to access,
it would have been even more unpopular than this, but
let's be honest, it's already pretty unpopular already. Not to
sound too dramatic, but I believe that Meta is a
(22:12):
deeply evil company and it's run by people that treat
human beings as pawns. Pawns to increase engagement metrics and
make money on advertising. And what makes the company so
unique is that the services it provides are just unquestionably awful.
Using both Facebook and Instagram is a battle with an
algorithm to see the people that you choose to follow,
(22:33):
and Meta as a company seems incapable of developing anything new, intivative,
or even useful. Yet it made over thirty six billion
dollars in revenue in Q one twenty twenty four, and
it did so by abusing and manipulating its users while
also failing to maintain any integrity or utility within two
of the most important platforms on the Internet. And I believe,
(22:55):
as crazy as it sounds, that this strategy will lead
to the contraction and eventual death of face Book at
the very least, and possibly Instagram. And I anticipate that
as things get more difficult for the company, it's going
to hit Instagram so much worse. According to data provided
to me by Similar Web, in the last three years,
Facebook's US website audience has declined by thirteen point seven percent,
(23:17):
and in the year of a year period from April
twenty twenty three to twenty twenty four, monthly active users
on Facebook's app have declined by two point two percent,
while Instagram's web aardy inscrewed by twenty three percent over
the last few years. In the last twelve months, its
growth has slowed to six point eight percent, and between
March and April twenty twenty four, Instagram's app monthly active
(23:38):
users in America declined by zero point eight percent. Instagram's
the cash cow. This is the thing to be worried about. Mark.
Facebook's monthly active users have been aggressively declining every month, though,
tumbling from a high of two hundred and eight million
monthly active users in May twenty twenty one to one
hundred and sixty one million monthly active users in April
(23:58):
twenty twenty four. Just to be clear, talking about the
website there, and that's the second lowest the number has
been in the entire period, beaten only by February twenty
twenty four, when it had one hundred and fifty eight
point eight million active users. On top of that year
of a year, Facebook's apps are a decline of two
point two percent in monthly active users. To put it simply,
(24:19):
Facebook's decaying, and they've lost nearly fifty million monthly active
users in the last three year in the US to
their website. Globally, things are a lot worse. Facebook has
lost twenty five point two percent of its monthly unique
website visitors since twenty twenty one, crashing from a high
of one point four five six billion in May twenty
(24:40):
twenty one to a low of one point oh four
billion in February twenty twenty four, slightly increasing to one
point five billion in April twenty twenty four, a loss
of three hundred and ninety seven million unique monthly visitors.
One has to wonder if these numbers might have been
what pushed Zuckerberg to try and turn the metaverse into
and I quote, the next generation of the Internet. Maybe
(25:03):
he knew, Maybe he knew that his disgraceful, lazy, half
baked abus of shitty, morally reprehensible approach to building social
networks was one that had a sell by date. Everything
you see on Facebook and Instagram today is a monument
to the works of a man that sees users as
rats in a digital maze built to make numbers go
up and investors happy. And I don't even think he
(25:26):
cares that much about investors. After all, he can't be fired.
I've seemed very angry in these episodes. I'm not telling
you how to feel. I'm just telling you how I feel.
(25:47):
And a lot of this comes down to a deep
frustration with Facebook and Instagram and Meta as a company,
because when you see a company with so much talent,
with so much influence, with so much responsibility, and you
see how little responsibility they feel to the people that
use their websites, it's just disgusting, especially when even the
(26:08):
slightest changes could make these websites so much better. Maybe
a little less profitable, but after all, this company makes
over ten billion dollars in profit a quarter, kind of
like Google. Hey, I should do an episode on those people.
Maybe I will in the future, But in all seriousness,
what Meta stands for right now is rot and what
(26:29):
Mark Zuckerberg stands for is evil. You know, it's just
society's mechanisms. They're far too slow and they lack the
precision to deal with a man like Mark Zuckerberg. And
he's a man that acts with just this shocking lack
of morality and I find it putrid. And this complex
machine he's used to torture humans for profit and power,
it's gone completely unchecked. A lot of government handwaving, but
(26:53):
no real changes. The best hope we have is the EU.
And as I mentioned before, Mark Zuckerberg he can never
be fired. We are stuck with him, and he can
and he will run this company into the goddamn ground
and he will hurt people on the way to doing it. Well,
Elon Musk, And just to be clear, he is a greedy, churlish, nasty, freakish, disgusting,
(27:18):
shameful man, Mark Zuckerberg is just something entirely different. He's
not stupid, he really isn't. And unlike Musk, he hasn't
seemed to have any compulsion for anyone to like him.
They occasionally put him in a chain or a normal
person outfit, or have him do barbecue to try and
pretend he's human. Eh. He seems kind of half hearted
(27:39):
in it. I can understand that, because that's not what
turns Mark Zuckerberg on I'm not making any suggestions about
sexual proclivities. Please do not sue me. What I'm saying
is Mark Zuckerberg craves numerical dominance, and he craves it
at any cost. He must force human beings to use Facebook,
and once they're there, he must make them move in
a way that he wishes and do the things he wishes.
(28:01):
Also that he can see the number go up. Mark
Zuckerberg will do whatever he wants because he built a
system so that he could never be fired, giving him
unilateral power over a monopoly he designed to chew through
people's lives, turning them into fuel for Meta's money machine,
and so he could get his rocks off looking at
and the numbers go up. Make no mistake, what Mark
(28:24):
Zuckerberg has done is monstrous, both in its damage to
society and its financial opulence. Facebook has made so many
people so rich in so many ways, and offered a
genuine societal service, and then it found every foreseeable way
to monetize every corner of our goddamn lives. Facebook's culture
is one of imprisonment and abuse, and it traps users
(28:47):
in engagement loops that tangibly harm them, something that Facebook
is both well aware of and intentionally not seeking to remedy.
And ultimately the software itself, the software behind Facebook, which
does have value in it in how it connects so
many people in so many ways. That software is a
prisoner of Mark Zuckerberg, who may or may not have
stolen the idea in the first place, making it just
(29:10):
another piece of data he's extracted through deeply shitty means.
At one point, Facebook was a social good, something that
contributed to meaningful connections between human beings separated by time
and geography. During the Arab Spring, protesters in Cairo held
up banners that read, in a mixture of English and Arabic,
thank you Facebook. Similar sentiments a daubed on to the
(29:33):
wall of the headquarters of Tunisia's Ministery of the Interior,
reflecting its role as a facilitator and a neutral communications network. Facebook,
even as leaked emails obtained by The Daily Beast revealed,
placed protests pages under special protection with a team providing
twenty four to seven monitoring that, by the way, was
in the past. At least in this regard, Facebook seemed
(29:54):
to understand its role in the world and was prepared
to kind of step up and own it. It refused
to bend the knee to Hosney Mubbarak and its horrible regime,
and on January twenty fifth, twenty eleven, was banned by
the Egyptian government two days before it shut down the
entire Internet. People used VPNs to get back on it,
but still Facebook used to mean something. Today, Facebook is
(30:16):
an example of everything wrong with the Internet and howgorithmic
iron maiden that nakedly cons users every minute, a parasite
that deprives creators of their audiences and users of their industry.
Facebook has no principles or backbone, and it's no longer
a reliable tool for connecting people as it once was
during the pro democracy protests I previously mentioned. Whereas once
(30:39):
you could have made a plausible case that even underneath
its flaws, Facebook had an ember of morality, a smidgeon
of a care, It gave a tiny bit of a fuck.
It's just no longer a coherent position. In a just world, Facebook, Instagram,
all metaproperties would be public utilities instead of becoming this
(31:00):
weird algorithmic fixation of a very strange multi billionaire weirdo. Sorry,
I shouldn't have called Mark Zuckerberger weirdo. You're right, that
just isn't harsh enough. Mark Zuckerberg is a goddamn monster.
Mark Zuckerberg is the opposite of what the tech industry
should stand for. He's a monopolist that deliberately makes and
(31:22):
proliferates bad software, and he makes the world worse for it.
Facebook and Instagram are insults to every single software engineer
in the world. Built to trick and swindle UNHRM rather
than provide any service. What Facebook and Instagram have become
is an insult to Silicon Valley. I may come off
as a pessimist sometime, but I'm actually a broken hearted romantic.
(31:45):
There was a time that Facebook had a measurable, meaningful,
and good effect on my life and billions of other
people's lives. There was a time this company had something
behind it. And even then, when I say this, I
realized two thousand and eights, when people you may know
went in, maybe it was always this bad, maybe they
were better at hiding it. But I'm not pessimistic about
(32:06):
this company because I want to be. I'm not even
a pessimist. I'm a fucking cynic. I'm a cynic because
I've read these documents. I've seen the way that this
company talks about the users. I've seen the way that
Mark Zuckerberg has deliberately hurt them. I've seen them make
changes or choose not to make changes in the case
of Project Daisy, because they wanted to keep things growing,
(32:27):
and they've done so in a way that's made so
many horrible assholes so rich, and so many millions and
billions of people miserable. And Mark Zuckerberg is the reason.
He is the person that puts out some of the
most popular and poorly made software in existence, and he
does so in a way that will continue to hurt
people until this company dies or until he's somehow removed, which,
(32:51):
as I've mentioned, is not possible. People in the tech industry,
people in society as well, should exile Zuckerberg. He should
not be welcomed in the circles of Silicon Valley. He
shouldn't be welcomed anywhere. This man owns a large chunk
of Hawaii. Make him piss off there and live alone,
or what you can live with this family obviously. Nevertheless,
(33:14):
this man, he may not be a criminal, but he
is a scumbag. He is a person that has deliberately
made things worse so that he can be richer, so
that he can see a number go up. He is
the rot Emperor, and he deserves no good, he deserves
(33:35):
no happiness, and he deserves to have this platform taken
away from him. But it's never gonna happen. We don't
have the government mechanisms to have someone like Mark Zuckerberg
remove from power. And because Sean Parker so desperately protected
Mark Zuckerberg's right to control everything, this is what you get.
This is actually what a true horrifying monopoly does. It
(33:56):
hurts people, It manipulates people. It makes the worst people rich,
and regular people poorer and sadder and more confused and
more lost and more disconnected and more unaware of the
world around them. It spreads conspiracies, It spread's lunacy, It
makes people unhappy, and it does so that so that
(34:17):
Mark Zuckerberg can add another fucking zero to another fucking
bank account. And it turns my goddamn stomach. And I'm sorry,
I realized across these episodes, I have been on one.
I have been quite angry, I have been full of fury.
I'm sorry if that isn't the right way to approach this,
And I've really done my best to come at this
(34:38):
from a researched and thoughtful perspective as well. But reading
this stuff has just so deeply angered me. It's so
deeply offended me. I did not know that tech companies
could be this craven. Or maybe I did, but I
was kind of in denial. I don't know. But in
reporting this, I have just been disgusted. And I've said
(35:04):
stomach churning at your turning or whatever it is a
few times, and it's true, though it is disgusting, I
actually love tech. I love this stuff. I find it
intellectually interesting. Take was how I got this job and
many jobs before it. Tech was something that meant something.
It was something about building great software and great hardware,
(35:25):
ways to connect people, make people able to do more things.
What Mark Zuckerberg stands for is a deep nihilism in tech,
where it isn't about building better things or connecting more people,
where it isn't about making the world better or more
aware or more educated, or giving them more access to
more things. No, it's about decay. It's about rot. It's
(35:51):
about growing nothing from nothing, again and again, and now
Facebook and Instagram are poisoned with generative AI bullshit thanks
to Mark Zuckerberg, a man with no creativity other than
that which makes people dance for him to increase numbers.
This man is a goddamn disgrace and his company is
a disgrace too. The world deserves better than Mark Zuckerberg.
(36:16):
Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Matttersowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com, m A T
T O. S O w Ski dot com. You can
(36:40):
email me at easy at Better Offline dot com or
visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast links
and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you
go to chat dot Where's Youreed dot at to visit
the discord, and go to our slash Better off Line
to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com,
(37:04):
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts
Host
Ed Zitron
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