The Impending Collapse of Meta
Maybe that’s a tad premature but it sure seems like we are witnessing a colossal meltdown at Meta. Ad revenues are way down and so too, is their stock price. Engagement on their platform is flat and skewing towards older less desirable audiences for marketers. To add to that, TikTok is eating their proverbial lunch and has cemented itself as the most popular platform in the world. As a Chinese owned entity, TikTok has major trust issues with the American public and yet 150 million of its users reside right here in the US.
So, what is Meta to do? Do they meet consumer demand for more long-form video content and revamp their Facebook and Instagram platforms? Do they steer more content creator dollars towards that end and attract these creators back to their platform? Do they try and compete? Afterall, they’ve already tried to peel off TikTok users by pushing TikTok content through their reels platform but consumers, while temporarily fooled, are getting wise to that. How many times have you been on FB or IG watching TikTok videos? If you’re like most of us, when you realize that’s what’s going on, you exit and pull up TikTok. Might as well see the tailored content from the source instead.
So there exists this conundrum they find themselves in and the path they chose to deal with it is as Anti-American as the allegations they wage at TikTok. They chose to use the force of government for protection. Instead of leveraging capital to attract the right content and therefore drive engagement back up, they used it to lobby congress. The hope is that big daddy government will ban TikTok as a national security risk (which it very well might be). But the issue of Chinese intrusion/manipulation aside, using the government as a tool to maintain market share is weak and feckless which is a direct reflection on their CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. It’s just another move illuminating the woes of a CEO who just laid off 10,000 people, roughly 12% of its workforce.
The truth of the matter is that Zuckerberg had the market all to himself as the first widely adopted social network. He was free to do whatever he liked and he did just that. Under his watch, Facebook censored political speech, suppressed content from people they disagreed with, manipulated, and sold our data thus violating the trust we all felt we had with Facebook, allowed bullying and other bad behavior on the platform because it was good for engagement and on and on. We all know his resume. So it is all too ironic that the same man at the center of so many congressional probes is now lobbying them to suppress TikTok from the competitive landscape.
In my humble opinion, this is perhaps the weakest response to foreign competition from an American CEO we have seen since the globalization of our economy. The same man who has repeatedly violated our trust and broken the rules, now wants to use the rule of law to protect his platform from being eaten alive by foreign competition. Does this embody the American spirit? Does this make us all proud that on a global stage, we resort to government force to protect US business instead of ingenuity and good old fashioned rolling up the sleeves to kick some commie ass?
His problem is that he can’t make the case that TikTok is doing nefarious things with our data because that is exactly what he has done through his entire tenure on the social media mountaintop. The chickens have come home to roost for him and I personally hope that other US entrepreneurs create better alternatives to TikTok, while protecting consumer privacy. Create demand; Don’t demand the suppression of creation!