What the f**k, Zuck?
Mark Zuckerberg is following the Musk playbook for social media. We know how “well” that worked for X, so why is he doing this? My best guess: because he can.
Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Whatsapp), took a turn to the right—hard right—eliminating fact-checking and “killing” its diversity programs.
These changes are an obvious bow to the new Administration and an attempt to ensure that social media continues unregulated in the United States. (In the EU, users have protections against social media that Americans can only dream of.) However, from a broader business perspective, it boggles the mind.
Here’s why: Mark Zuckerberg was allegedly behind the TikTok ban, lobbying Congress about “Homeland Security” throughout 2024. Unlike every other competitive apps, ByteDance would not sell to the mighty Meta. So, if he couldn’t buy it, he was going to be damn sure to get rid of it.
Ok, eliminating a competitor is Capitalism 101. It’s what he’s done since, that doesn’t make sense—either for his users or for his advertisers.
Instagram format was changed overnight without warning.
If Meta thought that people would go flocking to Instagram if TikTok disappeared. That might have, but he blew that opportunity with his racist, misogynistic, and homophobic corporate mandates.
TikTok users, while widely diverse (as 170 million would have to be), skew younger than other social media platforms. Seventy percent of TikTok users are under 35 versus 43 percent on Facebook. What those young people love about TikTok is the ability to learn, organize, and support one another, including marginalized groups. (A great example is the current TikTok University trend. This trend was inadvertently started by Dr. Barlow who posted an introductory video for her African American studies class. Others saw the post and now dozens of Black professors are offering their traditional courses via the platform.) Given this, there is little reason to believe they would go flocking to Insta after its new policy stated that:
People in the LGBTQ community could be called mentally ill
Trans and non-binary people can be called it, and
Women can be called property
Removing these safeguards makes the platforms unsafe for content creators and visitors alike, according to The Southern Poverty Law Center. We don’t know how quickly the content will devolve, but on Twitter the descent was almost spontaneous to the time Musk bought the platform. As the content became more crude and even deadly (beheadings and other gruesome content appeared), advertisers ran for the hills.
As if that is not bad enough, in a move that makes one suspect that Zuckerberg was sanguine about TikTok’s demise, he changed the format on Instagram to mimic that of TikTok. For the average content creator, that’s not a big deal, but for advertisers who plan their marketing months in advance this is a shocker.
In a move that reeks of desperation, Meta launched a program to “lure TikTok creators with a new bonus program,” per Karissa Bell’s article in Engadget. The program comes off as scammy because it promises creators “up to $5000,” which could be $5000 but it could also be a dollar.
This is what creators have to do in order to be part of the “breakthrough bonus program”:
Have a third-party presence and you have to link it to Facebook and Instagram
Accounts have to be a business account on Facebook and a professional account on Instagram
Over 90 days, you have to do 20 reels on Facebook and 10 reels on Instagram, and they have to be native to the Meta account (this is because most TikTok creators use Instagram for repurposing their content).
It is too early to tell if creators will do this, but my instinct says, “no.”
Changes are happening at Whatsapp you should be aware of
Let’s not let Whatsapp fly under the radar, because there’s stuff going on there, too.
While most people think of WhatsApp as a simple messaging tool, that was never the point. In international markets like India, Brazil, and Mexico, it has become similar to China’s WeChat, which combines messaging with social media and mobile payments.
And while the original creators of the app swore against amassing consumer data, that’s not the Meta way. The company is now doing a ful-court press to attract advertisers now that they have 200 billion users worldwide using the app for everything from making doctor’s appointments to selling real estate to direct-to-consumer sales for companies as large as L’Oreal.
According to Rest of the World, since Zuckerberg has “squeezed every cent out of Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp represents a potentially vast and largely untapped opportunity. It’s little wonder that Mark Zuckerberg has begun referring to WhatsApp as “the next major pillar” of his company.”
Meta’s AI profiles
Meta’s foray into AI profiles qualifies as a debacle. Beyond the obvious clumsiness of the content, choosing to create a Black, queer mother as one of the profiles leaves even me speechless. I do an analysis of this on TikTok.
Finally, as long as we’re talking about Zuckerberg’s utter ineptitude, let’s not forget he blew through $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse—a fake world that no one wanted.
If you are still on Meta platforms, please take a minute to ask yourself why. I understand that some smaller businesses need to be there, but there are a whole lot of people who don’t need to be. Deactivating is as good as deleting and might even be preferable so you can protect your name. Minimally, I recommend being strategic about your use of these platforms. They are not communities, and the people behind the scenes are not your “Facebook friends.”