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