Facebook is dying. Part II.

In my last post, I mentioned that Social (Control) Media is dying off, and we’re no worse for wear because of it.

I noted that Musk was ruining Twitter (as a business) and clearly had no idea what to do, because he has no successful businesses on their own merit, which make profit without ripping off the public via government theft of wages. (Taxation to give to private companies as endless bailouts.)

Musk is hardly alone. Many of the large US corporations operate this way.

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has gone totally crazy. Like Vladimir Putin deciding to invade Ukraine crazy.

He’s thrown so much money into the “Metaverse” VR crap, which everyone mocks, and most people who actually did buy the expensive headsets gave up trying to use within their first month, that he’s wiped out over $268 billion of wealth and climbing just with this, and only with the top 10 investors in Facebook.

Most of the loss goes to Zuckerberg, but in many cases, Facebook shares were stuffed into people’s retirement accounts like some sort of a Ponzi scheme, without their consent, because it was part of a passive fund.

(Most American workers have no control over their retirement investments, either because a pension fund “takes care of that” or because they’re in some sort of corporate savings schemes like 401(k) and 403(b), where they have to choose between funds, and they all have some shit in the plumbing so there is no perfect outcome.)

Facebook is failed. It has plunged in “book value” by over $700 billion in the past year. It just sacked 11,000 people today in “Round 1” (means more to come….), and it admits it will lose many more billions of dollars in “Metaverse” before Mark Zuckerberg runs the company into the ground completely.

Any one problem that Facebook has would be bad for the company, but probably not fatal.

Unfortunately for them, they’ve seen ad revenues decline as America enters quite possibly a worse recession than 2008, and their CEO has not only failed to see the recession coming, but blew through their cash reserves instead of investing it into the products people are actually “engaging” with. They have some, but they’re being utterly neglected due to the VR nonsense.

Zuckerberg takes advantage of the somewhat unique structure of Facebook to do whatever he wants with it (he set it up so he gets a lot of votes) and his investors only have two options. Sit there and continue to get thumped by a CEO who is squandering assets, or dump their shares for whatever they can get today, which floods the market with shares that nobody wants at lower and lower prices.

I do wish the people who are losing their jobs the best of luck in the 2023 Hunger Games.

Maybe some of them can even find a job that _benefits_ society next time instead of pampering my parents, both of which are right-wing cranks who are level 12 susceptible to paranoid conspiracy theories and propaganda, with a feedback bubble which makes them feel validated, or like they’re in some sort of clear majority in their political opinions, which get even more fringe by the year thanks to this gaslighting.

If my parents were a lot more astute than they actually are, they would notice that it was Jack Welch (GE/RCA merger, dad) and the Catholic Church (mom) who screwed them on their retirement and left them to rot, and Republicans that allowed it and are coming for their Social Security money while they worry about non-existent threats like “brown people from other countries”, like the Fox News telescreens order them to.

In his case, he got his from a wealthy Republican businessman, and in her case, the pension turned out to be nothing more than an unsecured promissory note from a Mafia-affiliated group of pedophiles with a city-state in the middle of Italy. Will they never learn?

(Rhetorical. People who haven’t figured it out by 71 or 65 probably won’t. Mom still swears up and down that the Archdiocese told them their pensions were guaranteed for 20 years. Just like they were previously guaranteed for “as long as you live”, and before that they were “guaranteed to grow until you’re 66”, then “63”, then “62”, then “nobody new gets a pension and yours is frozen NOW”. How much money is there really? Nobody will say. Where is it invested? “Don’t worry!”)

Even if the unemployed Facebook and Twitter workers take a job at Taco Bell, slinging cheap tacos and burritos at people who are stoned at 2 AM is neutral to the fabric of our society.

Facebook and Twitter are as corrosive as Xenomorph blood and I wish the platform a swift and total demise. But they’ve already done insurmountable harm to people like my parents.

Mom spent all of COVID bashing me for being responsible and levelheaded enough to get me and my spouse our vaccines. For wearing masks at large gatherings. For using hand hygiene. And we didn’t get COVID, and they got….COVID and the flu at her house, at the same time.

She lacks the ability to comprehend how vaccines work, or even the very basics of germ theory, which is unfortunate since she’s a nurse.

Many political confederates of mom and dad are no longer with us because listening to the Party of Trump was the last mistake they ever made.

But even as they witnessed millions of each other dying on ventilators, they still proclaim it was all a hoax.

This is what happens when you’re watching Fox News and looking at Facebook all day.

Facebook waited until this country was on the verge of being overthrown in a coup before they even thought to ban Trump. It took _days_ after for them to claim they made a very brave decision.

In the background, they didn’t want to do it. They wanted dimwits looking at Facebook, even if Trump was the reason why. It helped them sell ads.

Facebook is too dangerous to continue. Fortunately, I doubt we will need to endure it for too much longer.

Facebook had to pay us about $800 because they violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

Facebook had to pay us about $800 because they violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

I got a $397 check for my spouse last week and a $397 check for myself this week.

Facebook had been tagging us in our pictures and storing our facial patterns in their facial recognition programs. That turned out to be a big problem for them that cost them nearly $700 million in the resulting class action settlement.

Scumbag corporations have been losing big time due to the BIPA, and they want it repealed. There’s pending lawsuits against at least a dozen major companies, and lots of settlements too.

The only thing corporations understand is losing money. Facebook has already had a lot of fake stock value erased this year.

Facebook blamed the loss mostly on Apple’s alleged new “privacy” functions on the iPhone, even though Facebook already has patents pending on how to avoid those features and track people with iPhones anyway. As long as their apps are even on your phone, you’ve lost already whether you use an Android or an iPhone.

I use a Free and Open Source app called Frost from F-Droid that gives Facebook no significant access to my phone. It’s basically a blinged out webview that tricks Messenger into working. So it’s very likely that Facebook has less access to my Pixel 6 than anything Apple has done to box them in on an iPhone, where all you can use is Facebook’s apps.

Facebook’s financial problems have more to do with laws like the California and Illinois privacy statutes.

The only safe way to operate is to assume that anyone you track could be in Illinois or California, which is why although BIPA is an Illinois law, and Illinois is a state of 12.8 million people, Facebook disabled their tagging and facial recognition everywhere in the world after losing $700 million dollars.

Another source of Zuckerberg’s heartburn is the state of the economy in general. Major stocks of companies with real products are down 30 even 40%, and not even Walmart was spared.

Most of the ads I’ve seen go by on Facebook are from lawyers suing app companies.

Since the economy is so bad right now (Maybe call it the “Don’t Say Recession Recession”?), consumers have to tighten their wallets, and while that may or may not eventually break the hyperinflation (since most of this is due to Biden and Congress throwing around trillions of dollars we don’t have, that came at the expense of your bank account), it means the value of advertising is collapsing.

This is what set off the DotCom Bubble Collapse in the early 2000s.

Eventually, investors get sick of losing money, the hysteria wears off, and reality sets in.

Usually in an environment where the Fed loses its appetite for entertaining that round of mania.

Like what’s starting to unfold now.

The reason why Elon Musk wants Twitter isn’t because he has a plan to turn a profit. His Tesla company is down 41% YTD, you know.

It’s because he wants to be able to say whatever he wants without any censorship, and invite Trump back to scream and yell, but there will still be “content moderation” and spyware tracking the people foolish enough to have accounts there.

I’ve never really understood how a company that lets you post 140 characters from the toilet that disappear into the void quickly has managed to stay in business. Pretty much the only thing on Twitter are influencers, “brands”, and politicians. The 1% can say whatever they want unfiltered.

Do you even want to be on this thing?

I barely even have a presence on Facebook anymore. It’s not generally worth using. You hope other people will hate like your vacation or something and there’s a lot of stress to be fake popular on it.

I tried to tell Roy Schestowitz that he’d be a lot happier and lose nothing if he got off Twitter years ago, but the only reason he left was because they shoved him out the door for criticizing Bill Gates.

Merely criticizing the rich and powerful is enough to get you thrown out.

It is dangerous to have “social media” replace the Web, because then they can throw you out when they don’t like what you say, even if it’s not illegal to say that. And that’s why corporations and the governments want the Web to die. They can spy and censor better that way. It was much harder to do this in bulk when everyone who wanted a blog just got their own Web site.

Google even crawls my blog and I get readers. When you post to Facebook and Twitter, your thoughts just die immediately. It gives the illusion of having spoken, even though nobody is really listening.

I wonder if Elon Musk will let him back in. He is a “free speech absolutist”, or so he says. 😉