Facebook’s No Good, Very Bad, Horrible Day!
The social media giant’s downturn was a long time coming
When your business model depends on profiting from your users’ ignorance, eventually the gig will be up. So it seems to be for Facebook, or Meta, which had a historically horrible day last week and began to lose significant numbers of users for the first time.
When I first proposed that Facebook could be facing a massive negative inflection point in my book Seeing Around Corners, my editor was nonplussed.
It was mid-2018, and at that time it looked as though the company could do no wrong. It had by then succeeded in wiping out much of the traditional publishing business model, had successfully pivoted to mobile, gobbled up (together with Google) pretty much all digital advertising spending, acquired a stunning user base of over 2 billion people, made pivotal acquisitions of potential competitors (WhatsApp and Instagram) and was enjoying substantial user growth.
“You really think Facebook could get into trouble?” he asked me. Why, yes, I replied — the weak signals were already there.
Institutions and ecosystems lag reality
As I wrote in the book, social media “had a difficult 2018. It included the spread of ‘fake news’, false…
