The Rise and Fall of Social Media Empires: Meta (Facebook), Part 3 Podcast Transcript

FaceMash, The Facebook, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Meta...is the Threads flop the end of an era?  In this three-part series we go back to where it all started and trace Facebook's early successes and controversies. This episode addresses the core question: Is this the end for Meta? Increased competition, apathy from users, and increased government scrutiny present new challenges, but we'll discuss why we think it's more likely just the beginning of the end.

Taryn Ward  Hi. I'm Taryn Ward,

Steven Jones and I'm Steven Jones,

TW.  and this is Breaking the Feed, Social Media: Beyond the Headlines. 

SJ.  We're taking a closer look at the core issues around social media, including the rise and fall of social media empires, to better understand social media's role in our everyday lives and society.

TW. Today, we'll wrap up our look at whether Meta is a social media empire on the verge of collapse. During the past few episodes, we've largely looked back at what's already happened. But today, we'll work forward from Facebook's 2021 rebrand, and discuss the launch of their newest social app Threads; and consider whether this could be the end for Meta a lot to do one episode, but we'll do our best. 

As a reminder, we started these three episodes with a question, "Could this be the end for Meta?"; and we gave ourselves away early on in that very first episode and said probably not. 

But the better question, really, is whether this is the beginning of the end for Meta. And that's a more complicated answer. Before we talk about the rebrand.  Let's talk briefly about COVID. We covered some of the controversies during that time, and maybe that's the answer. But in so many ways, COVID was an opportunity for Facebook. People were at home, people were desperate to connect, but they weren't using Facebook, and I think when we look back at all of this, that might be the first real sign that they were in trouble. 

SJ. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? You know, this is the dominant social network on the planet. It has a messaging app branded as Facebook, it's got a messaging app as WhatsApp. In the last episode, we talked you quoted Mark Zuckerberg saying that they developed this state of the art app for sharing photos and experiences. And yet people didn't generally use it for that. And instead, we saw the rise of things like Discord and, you know, something which we'll probably talk about at length later, TikTok, which definitely doesn't really connects people, but was entertaining; and that also tells you something important, and for me, the real problem with Facebook during the during the COVID pandemic was the incredible rise of mis- and disinformation, something which, something that was such a problem that the who declared an infodemic. That there was, you know, just a deluge of, you know, misleading and incomplete information, and, you know, I'm, as you know, I worked for the Public Health Agency during the 2003 SARS epidemic, and we also shared it like it was remarkable at the time, because we had this daily teleconferences organised with the WHO were the latest research was shared amongst all of the agencies that were working across the nation, the different nations that were affected, and communication was genuinely open and, and clear. But the difference this time was that the rise of online journals sent from 2003 through to 2019-20, meant that people were publishing pre-accepted sort of articles online. 

That was a problem for two reasons. One, that because they were pre-publication, they hadn't gone through peer review, and therefore, they were not necessarily accepted as being a reasonable representation of the truth. And also scientists right in a very peculiar way, we're trained to do it, in the same way, I guess that lawyers are trained to communicate in a very particular way, which makes sense to other lawyers and prevents misunderstanding scientists to talk to write in a similar sort of way, and that generally hedges right? Because if a piece of scientific data is impossible is if it's impossible to disprove it, then it's not really science, right? It has to be, at least in theory until people haven't been able to disprove it. And then you sort of accept that is true. But people don't understand the public don't understand that, and this absolute deluge of information, and there were 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of articles published really quickly, meant that there was a lot of stuff which looked like it was written by decent scientists, but may, in fact, have never been officially published in a peer-reviewed journal because it just wasn't good enough. And I reviewed some papers for scientific journals, which, you know, I rejected, and the consensus amongst the peer reviewers was unanimous. And so there's those data could have been published online as Preprints, but never ever published, because they weren't. 

But all of this stuff got distilled down into Facebook. And what was worse was that became a part of political issue. Right? There was a particularly in the US there was this very clear dichotomy between the Republicans and the Democrats. And it's really bizarre to me as a bystander from the country just to the north, that when you have a Republican president paying vast amounts of money through his office to you know, the executive arm to build new vaccines, you have members of the House and members of the Senate and governor's decrying the effort to vaccinate people. Absolutely ridiculous! And all of this was taking place online on apps like Facebook, which is just particularly good at it and let's not downplay the role that Twitter also played. But we're talking about Facebook today. Well, you were sort of a layperson, an educated layperson, but a layperson what was your impression, Taryn?

TW. Yeah, I mean, I think you and I spent hours during the pandemic, and after talking about these things, and by talking about these things, I don't mean like, philosophically, I mean, me asking you to explain the hierarchy of medical information to me because I would read an article, you know, I like to think of myself as pretty well informed, I do my research, I tried to understand what's being said, both on paper and in between the lines. But some of it is really hard to sift through and to understand, and, you know, I think when this isn't your area, it can be really hard to understand the difference, not just between a peer-reviewed article and a non-peer-reviewed article, but then a peer-reviewed article, an article that's maybe sort of respected, and then some random person sitting in his mom's basement, just clacking away in the clique keyboard, and saying, whatever comes to his mind, and the trouble is one of the troubles is, on Facebook, it's really hard to tell the difference, and people don't like to talk about bots or hear about bots. But when you add on top of that, you know, 100,000 people who liked this article, and who are engaging with this article in a positive way, it can start to look like oh, maybe they're onto something, maybe this is true, maybe this is really how it works. And it's only by having discussions with somebody who knows more than you do. Or, or testing it some other way, and I'm not advocating that you test these theories yourself because you'll end up dead, probably

SJ. Some of them are deadly. Yep. 

TW. Yes, some of them are really, and I'm not saying I thought that any of those were true, but there are some others sort of, you know, early on, one of the things we talked about was, which type of mask made sense, you know, I'm getting on an aeroplane, I really can't afford to get sick again, what should I do? And the evidence out there really varied and depending on who you are listening to or talking to, you could come away with very different ideas about which, which thing was the thing to do. And I think back to so when I was in grade school, I had this teacher who tried to explain the difference between a law and a theory. And I think something similar applies to these articles. Not exactly the same. But to be a law, it really has to be like gravity, right? Like, gravity is a law, we understand that gravity works. Gravity is a thing, test, test, test, test, test, as every time you test it, gravity exists, great. But there are lots of other theories that are closer or less close to being the law, and I think for people who are just casually tiptoeing into these areas, it's really hard to see the difference.

SJ. It's virtually impossible. And you know, science doesn't do itself any favours, and Hollywood doesn't do scientists. And if it was I, I've talked to you before, about one of the most influential presentations was about a was from a communications expert to a scientific conference, and she asked the question, which profession dies most often per capita in TV and film? And the answer wasn't policemen, or even criminals, it was scientists and what was really disturbing was that public sympathy for those characters demise was also lower than it was for pretty much anyone else because they're almost always depicted as dying as a result of the nefarious schemes like making super intelligent sharks. Something which I don't think anyone is currently working on. And please don't start. But, But, but you know, that that's the sort of that's that's what we have to deal with as professionals; and because extroverts generally don't go into science as a career, I think most people would agree that scientists, not the best communicators in the world, we lose control of the narrative really quickly. And it certainly it was, there were some difficult messages which needed to be conveyed and advice, rightly changes during a pandemic, because our understanding sciences understanding of what's going on changes. And, you know, initially, a lot of what we inferred was what we knew, or the advice was what we inferred from the behaviour of other Coronavirus isn't it turns out that this one was a bit different and behaves a bit differently. But yeah, it was really difficult and, you know, I was having a conversation with err with someone yesterday and they said the problem with medical advice on online is, you don't know whether they're a doctor or whether they're a doctor of the thing that they say they are right. You could be a doctor. You can have a PhD in astrophysics. It doesn't qualify you to talk about women's reproductive health, but you've got Doctor in your name on Tiktok, or Facebook, and therefore, people are gonna take you just a little bit more seriously. So that lack of, you know, understanding of who you can talk to is a bit of a problem. And, you know, I think, as I said, scientists, but also the medical profession have a bit of a problem in real life about with with actually talking to people in ways that they understand. I think both groups sort of understand that, but they're not really sure what to do about it, although I think the medical profession is ahead of scientists, but certainly it caused a huge amount of problem. And I think, in my opinion, increase the number of people particularly in the US who needlessly died of COVID, which is, which is a tragedy and one which you have. Facebook does bear some sort of responsibility for, I think, because they're not responsible for the content. The algorithm does allow and promote information based on likes, not on whether it's verifiably true. And that's a that's a bit of a problem.

TW. Hmm, No, I think I think, well, that's right. I think whether it was because of this, whether people started to feel the way you and I were feeling, and others that this was not a source of reliable information, or for other reasons. Maybe you didn't see people spending more and more time on Facebook, and I think that was really interesting because it was such it had the potential to be a moment where people really went back to that because so many old friendships are on Facebook, so many family friendships are on Facebook, and, you know, in theory, it could have been a great opportunity to use Facebook to reconnect with those people. But as we know, that's not what happened and in fact, I would say, and tell me if you disagree, but I don't think you will, that this further eroded any credibility that Facebook had left?

SJ. No, I definitely don't disagree with you. I think it's absolutely true, and it is interesting, right? And it's also interesting, think about it like the younger demographic is leaving Facebook or is not active on Facebook as much as they're talking to the Gran, but the older community are the people that you were actually worried about during COVID. Let's face it, it wasn't you and me who were likely to die. It was people who were definitely on Facebook a lot. Which makes it interesting, and you know, in our episode, on CB radios and shortwave radios, like I mentioned that during COVID, there was a resurgence in the giving out of licenses for citizen band radios, they actually hassle resurgence because people are choosing to use those to communicate, which is a bizarre choice, since everybody has a phone and they've got Facebook and everything else on it. But yes, Facebook did not benefit in the way that so many other apps that YouTube had a boost because people were using it for education Discord, the same thing in there were a whole series of apps, which did very well during the pandemic, but but Facebook wasn't one of them. And now, Mark Zuckerberg would probably say, Well, we already had such a dominant position. How much would you expect us to grow? Well, yeah, you did. But you were in a perfect position to consolidate that worldview. But you didn't. And that was because people weren't really interested, I think.

TW. No, I think all of that's fair. Even if Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't necessarily agree. So, we have to talk about the rebrand again, looking back now, as we sort of stack all of these things. It makes sense, 2021, Meta. This? Yeah, part of its new determination to build the Metaverse, fine. Billions of dollars later, here we are. We have Meta, which now is sort of the umbrella for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp et cetera. I think the idea was to shed some of the bad feelings that Facebook, in particular, had attracted, let's say, and maybe to give Instagram and WhatsApp a fighting chance.

SJ. Isn't it interesting? So, you know, that rebrand was odd. To me at the time, at least, because I was thinking, well, they already have dominant like brand position. Facebook is the social media app for the entire world. But they also had a PR problem, and you know, if you are a tech billionaire, and you don't like this world because there's COVID in it, and people don't like you, what is the best thing that you can do is make an artificial world where you are essentially God, and that's what the Metaverse sort of was right? This attempt to make a big universe where everybody appears by avatar and therefore a little bit plastic themselves: and you know, where you can control absolutely every element of the environment and make sure that literally everything you see is an advert for something or some other thing, which is absolutely abhorrent worldview from for me and I'm sure you but absolutely probably made everybody very excited in the Facebook, boardroom and yeah, Facebook did need a rebrand it didn't work right? There were 30, was it $31 billion spent on the on the Metaverse and they just made it all open source and decided to call a halt to the project. You know, and the problem was that if you don't really think very carefully about the problems with what you've got, you're just going to replicate some of those mistakes. And we saw that you know, you had people's avatars, a young woman's avatar being sexually assaulted in the Metaverse within minutes of joining. You know, that, that's beyond troubling; and, and, you know, and goes to the fact that on some of these networks, because you don't know who because you are anonymous, you can do things which you would never even consider doing in real life. And obviously, they could say, "Well, this was a, it was a bunch of pixels". But it isn't like this, there's somebody at the end of that, and that is psychologically affecting them. There are real people involved here on the other end of those 3D glasses, and, you know, of course, it went wrong. I mean, with hindsight, it obviously was always going to.

TW. Yeah, and speaking of real people in the real world, since the rebrand reported 11,,000 employees, which is approximately 13% of the company's workforce overall, has been laid off. And the company has made some major cuts across the board. So d,efinitely not a high point. But then, despite all of this in 2023, we get Threads. Threads was sort of an attempt to replace Twitter. The messaging on this wasn't exactly clear. But that was sort of the implication. You know, people are mad at Elon Musk and not happy about how he's running things at Twitter for plenty of good reasons. We'll get into that in another episode. But, you know, Threads, yay, Mark Zuckerberg to save the day, and we saw huge initial growth. You know, if we compare it to Clubhouse, Instagram, and BeReal. It really. Those first two day sign-up up numbers were off the charts. I signed up pretty much everyone I know, signed up. It was very low stakes, or at least that's how it f,lt; and then we saw this huge, huge, drop-off! You know, we've talked about how some of these social media empires have done a faceplant, but this was really a hugh drop-off, and the question is why? The answer, I think, is pretty simple. It's a terrible product. Nobody wants. That's, that's it. There's not really a whole lot else to say. Like, it doesn't really serve a purpose. You know, I could go on and on. It's just not any good. But there are some other issues too. Threads flopping is far from Meta's only problem, and I would argue, instead, along with billions that were burned on the Metaverse, as you rightly pointed out, this is a sym,ptom or these are symptoms of more fundamental issues that will be easily resolved. The way I see it, there are four issues that I don't se,e how even if Mark Zuckerberg returns to his super lucky, super smart, quick days, I'm not sure how they're going to resolve this. So

• Number one, a shaky foundation shaky foundation led to an unsustainable growth model that's resulted in an unsustainable model overall,
• Two, increase competition from several directions including TikTok. They're just not it's it's very hard to compete. 
• Three apathy and disdain from users. A lot of this is related to the first point. But early users and young people are both on the same page. And that's never a good sign when that page is no thank you. 
• Finally, increasing and well-deserved government scrutiny. 

So the first point is shaky foundation we looked back at Facemash, we looked back at The Facebook, Facebook has lacked in meaningful purpose from the very beginning, and it's not clear that they ever found one beyond move fast and break things, and this only works if you're constantly moving fast and constantly breaking things is always winning. No one can, always win and who is more attractive is not a purpose.

SJ. Absolutely not. Nor is it helpful. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right, and 100% I think this lack of purpose, lack of focus and lack of understanding of what you were building. The fact that people, liked it was you know, not genius. It was I think largely luck and you know, ruthless acquisition of the things which were potentially competitive and could be potentially useful. That was brilliant. 

But you know, people, the world moves fast, you know, fashion moves fast and social media is a little bit fashionable, you know, Ti. Iis the thing and I think TikTok is already in danger of heading in is in trouble because they're, they have to make money now, and that's, that's going to change the way that it works. Facebook was fun before it had to make money. So, you know that I think that that is really that is really important, and maybe the, we're still actually at the tail end of the first generation of really good social media apps, you had like generation zero up into MySpace, and they've got gen one up until Tiktok. But I think you know, what we need now is one, a system which is built specifically to connect people in meaningful ways and allow them to do the things that they want to do. But that requires a different operating model and a different ethos and learning from the mistakes and that's something which Facebook has never actually managed to do. Whether it's Meta or Instagram or WhatsApp, 

TW. Well, it requires a different revenue model, and that's part of the problem here is the question of who is Facebook really for? And I don't mean demographics, although they definitely have a yellow person problem, but whose interests do they actually serve? It's not users. So, I guess maybe the answer is advertisers. But really, the answer is its own interests, and any other needs that they happen to meet are largely a coincidence.

SJ. I was a relatively new, early, early adopter, because I wasn't in an American university by 2008, was pretty early and I used a lot. I rarely use it now. In fact, I think I still have to go on and thank people for their birthday messages, and that's, you know, my two weeks ago. So, anybody who's listening to this, that is a friend of mine, and I haven't said thank you. Hopefully, I will have done it before you hear this. But if not, thank you very much. 

The reality is that people aren't using it and like you said, you know, young people definitely not signing up, and not looking at it, if they have an account; and I'm not looking at it, people older than me, are maybe still on it, because they understand it. And but the question is, is it doing them any good, because it's not really connecting them to their children or their grandchildren anymore, if we're not on it, we're not using it very much. And, you know, I think it's a bit of a fashion right to say, we need purpose driven companies. But I think you do have to have some kind of purpose that and serve an actual need. And it is, you're absolutely spot on when you say that the only need that Facebook is serving as its own. And in order to do that, it has to sort of provide a service to advertisers not to its users. especially

TW. Especially now, because they are advertising and that makes it less fun. But they're also facing more and more competition, not that many of the competitors are any better. But Facebook especially feels quite dated, and although it continues to fill specific need, especially with groups and some of these things that people have really made part of their lives. For a company or an empire built on the premise that it's constantly growing, this can't possibly be enough. And so, you know, Facebook is, is really facing challenges from a lot of different directions, and I would say the third one that's worth talking about is apathy from users; and this, of course, is related to the first point who does Facebook serve? Users have caught on that it's not them, and so more than feeling dated, Facebook feels less and less relevant; and Instagram and WhatsApp can't fix that, and in fact, Instagram in particular, is starting to face scrutiny and popularity issues with young people, and in fact, most young people only really use Facebook when it's required and most of Facebook's original users have moved on, you know, as you were just saying, you and I were relatively early to Facebook, and now it's sort of uh, oh, great. I have to remember somebody's birthday, and I guess I'll check in once in a while to see if there's a class reunion or something like that. But that's about it.

SJ. It is, you know, and every time I do spend any time on there, I'm disappointed. I used to do it to see what my friends and family members were doing, and now it is memes and ads and recycled TikTok's recycled via Instagram because of course, they were on a you know, and so I'm seeing things that I've seen before, and that's it's like, I don't know, you know, one of those rerun channels on cable TV in North America, where you're watching Seinfeld and friends for 24 hours a day, you know, it's Facebook has become that it is no longer HBO. It's classic movies and there's a market, but it's not the market that they want and that's a problem and that the reason they've lost that market is because they don't serve our needs. Right?

TW. Yep. In in the controversies haven't helped either, which we've talked about. But, you know, I think there's a sense that Facebook has failed to pick a lane. Are conspiracy theories welcome? Are they not welcome? They have some really bizarre content rules and inconsistent enforcement. You know, at one point, they claimed to have a sort of Supreme Court that would resolve these issues. Don't even get me started on that. There's a mis- and disinformation thing that we talked about that they really picked up with COVID; and, you know, more and more, there's an awareness of the danger, not only on Facebook but on Instagram, which is supposed to be sort of the darling social network of younger people. And now we're all really becoming more aware of how problematic this is, and you know, it's worth saying again here, cases like Molly Russell, which I don't want to get too into, but these are things that are really changing lives and not for the better. And it doesn't leave anyone with a sense of generosity in matters direction. 

SJ. No, I think that's absolutely right, and I mean, they're not the first social media app to run afoul of this, you know, Tumblr had a similar problem years ago and faced the backlash, and you know, some of my kids were really loved Tumblr, and that, I don't think they've been on it for months, if not longer. So, you have to be careful, you have to take care of your users. And you know, whilst we've talked about some of the misinformation, we haven't talked about the disinformation, like the state-sponsored efforts to do this. And to me, this is a topic for probably an episode or possibly a number of episodes. But there are concerted, state sponsored efforts to spread disinformation at this court, we only hear a little bit about it, but I think we can delve into it. But it's a huge problem on Facebook, and they haven't dealt with it as proactively as perhaps they could, and that's driven, of course, by the fact that you're anonymous, you don't really need to go through any hoops to sign up and the more users that they apparently have, the better it is for their shareholders and their stock price; and so the fact that those people are fake and run from, you know, countries that are not friendly, they don't they just isn't as a thing that they have to worry about. Right, that it's good for them. 

TW. Yeah, and with that brings us to our fourth, well, not our fourth problem Meta's fourth problem, and that is increased government scrutiny. You know, because of all of these things, regulators are fed up, and hundreds of millions in lobbying expenses have limits, thankfully, and especially now that the public has started to turn, this is going to be a bigger and bigger problem. You know, we've heard from regulators more and more that they're tired of being painted as too stupid to regulate and the constant privacy violations and risks presented. It just is, it's too much to ask of regulators, and they're tired of all these messes.

SJ. And they should be, I mean, let's be honest, you can love the FDA, or you can hate the FDA, but they take a fairly proactive view, and they take their job seriously. You know, you have to demonstrate a drug is safe, and if you were to develop a drug that played with people's dopamine and serotonin levels, it would have to be extensively tested and approved before you released it, and the reality is that all of these social media companies have algorithms and systems which do exactly that, and none of them were approved, there was no testing, and there's increasing evidence that are actually very bad for people, particularly young people who these apps are consistently targeting. And so, the regulators should be concerned. 

And I think the report from the Royal Society of Public Health on the impact of social media in children, and the most recent advisory from the US Surgeon General is also, you know, drawing further attention to that and telling parents, you know, we know you think this is harmless, but it's just not, or at least, we're not sure it is. And we need more evidence, and we need these companies to be more responsible. And if we're not going to volunteer to be more responsible, then, you know, that's why regulations exist. And I think lots of countries, the UK, and the US, among them are loath to introduce new regulations, because it's not politically the sort of thing that they like to do. But the reality is, they're needed here, because these kind of these companies operate in, in a vacuum.

TW. Yes. And that's a good that is a very fair point. You know, it is the economic climate at the moment is not a great one, and so, introducing more regulations is, is tricky. But more than that, you know, there are issues around freedom of expression and similar things. This is a, you know, this is a very messy area, but we're going to do a whole series on myths and disinformation, a whole series on freedom of expression. So, we'll really get into that. 

In the meantime, I think Elon Musk weirdly bought Mark Zuckerberg some credibility and some time. I know, but it's true. He feels like right now, the lesser of two evils. I would say this is arguable, given how many young people continue to be affected by Instagram's policies and enforcement. But I also am a parent, and this is something that's on my mind every day this this angle of it is a particularly soft spot of mine, and I think probably both of them are, you know, problematic in their own ways. Let me reframe that they are both problematic in their own ways. 

So, is this the end for Meta? If you scroll through Threads and see how few people are actually using it, there's some reason to think it is. But I think it's more accurate to say that this could be the beginning of the end. And we'll certainly be watching closely to see whether signs point to a slow fizzling out or a sudden crash. Next time, we'll start our look at the rise and fall of Twitter, or rather whether X, formerly known as Twitter, is a social media empire on the rise or headed for a fall. In the meantime, we'll post a transcript of this episode with references on our website. 

You can find this and more information about us at TheBrightApp.com; and if you'd like to take a deeper dive into what's happened with other social media empires, check out our episodes on AOL Instant Messenger, MySpace and GChat.

SJ. Until next time, I'm Steven Jones,

TW.  and I'm Taryn Ward.

SJ. Thank you for joining us for Breaking the Feed, Social Media: Beyond the Headlines.