Earlier this month Facebook announced that, for the first time ever, its number of daily users declined. While a relatively small dip, from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion, the news came as somewhat of a surprise, and a costly one at that.
Meta, its parent company, soon saw its stock plunge by more than 25%. That erased more than $230 billion and amounted to what was the biggest single-day drop in terms of value in the history of the U.S. stock market. And I think we should all celebrate.
It’s no secret that the social media giant, which also includes Instagram, is bad for our health. The Wall Street Journal laid that bare in its “Facebook Files” investigation published late last year. The various apps harm young users, especially girls. And they make adults angrier than they would be if they were unplugged more often.
We can only hope more people will. Long gone are the days where the platforms were primarily used for pictures of puppies and graduations. They now rarely connect you with anyone, which I thought were the platforms’ original purpose.
Instead, the algorithms exploit our worst tendencies to fear those who may have different opinions than our own. The feeds are like cable news, only worse. They find the sliver of topics with which people passionately disagree and deliver them to our screens over and over and over again.
No matter that most people, regardless of party or social standing, agree on far more things than they disagree. That’s boring and ignored because those topics don’t increase engagement, which the company needs in order to sell more advertising.
Speaking of ads, Meta expects new privacy changes to Apple phones to decrease the company’s 2022 revenue by about $10 billion. Basically, if the apps can’t track you, its advertisements are less effective and, thus, less valuable. Again, good.
Perhaps the company shouldn’t have tracked us in the first place, or collected all our data only to sell it and use it to find ways to make us stay online longer. I think the damage these platforms have done to us and, in turn, the damage we’ve done to each other using these platforms has yet to be fully measured. Remember the affable, live-and-let-live Montana attitude of a decade ago? Part of that is gone and you wonder if it will ever return. Now, like everywhere else, the polarization these apps wrought is leaving behind lasting wounds in communities large and small.
For its part, Meta continues to bully countries to allow it to grow unfettered and unregulated. Recently, it warned that blocked talks over privacy rules could result in Facebook and Instagram no longer being offered in Europe. To which German Economy Minister Robert Habeck responded: “After being hacked I’ve lived without Facebook and Twitter for four years and life has been fantastic.”
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire added: “I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook.”
We can only hope this is a tipping point. Can we rediscover more of what we have in common if we’re more unplugged? One can dream.