It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta(theguardian.com) |
It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta(theguardian.com) |
I think does not reflect the reality of how competitive capitalism works.
He went out of the way to make his company structure prevent that (also Elon)
hilarious and ironic
It is singularly idiotic that people think people, companies, boards, governments, or anyone else should be "good", and that society will progress by rooting out "evil" ones, as adjudicated by their own standards.
People and by extension companies of people and by extension corporations, NGOs, governments, and everything else in society behaves according to incentives. "Safety of users" or "approval of The Guardian employees" does not rank particularly highly in the incentive scale next to money for anybody, least of all Facebook shareholders, lol.
The factors that influence behaviors are pretty simple. Money, negative money, threat of judicial or ultrajudicial retribution, etc. The people as a whole have levers to pull in order to shape society as they would like. Wishing for good and praying for evil to be dispelled are not among them, that's just like any other superstition.
Zuckerberg is never resigning from Meta. Investors don't want him to resign from Meta.
What it is time for, though, is to ask ourselves as a society if the ad-fueled privacy-infringing depression-triggering attention-grabbing social media feeds are worth it.
People used to smoke. Now they dont. Change is possible.
Stepping down as CEO would do nothing, so unless you plan on forcing him to sell his share IDK what the point of the article is.
Mark Zuckerberg (13.68% equity; 61.2% voting)[1]
If you think the actions of Meta are wrong and should be prevented, you need to act on the regulatory level, not appeal to the very shareholders who profit off the behaviour.
This. Otherwise it's just a fruitless game of whac-a-mole as new reptiles inevitably step up to sustain the profit opportunity.
I would rather make a lifelong campaign “don’t do drugs”… if you make national all-year-long donate-funded campaigns on every corner, social networks’ providers would need to regulate themselves as they’ll have higher churn rate.
Recent campaigns don’t work too much as they are endemic.
these days with what might as well be branch capture by these bazillionaire entities, id be very surprised to see any actions attempted at the regulatory level against zuck against meta against any of this class ever actually make it into law. am i jaded sure but im mostly stepping back and looking at the game board at this point. i will be very surprised if things ever balance / restore in my lifetime, for now i literally do think the rest of my life is not going to have any chapter where the law puts zuckerberg or meta in its place.
Not everyone gets super voting shares, but everyone gets a life and has to live on the same planet.
> 'Vetinari, are we to believe that you knowingly put the most important bank in the city into the charge of a known bank robber?'
> [...] 'Should he have left it in the hands of unknown bank robbers?'
We can nope out of FB, IG, but what about WhatsApp?
I don't use it personally but my wife and the extended family does. Asking them to get off of the juice has been a fail. Network effects, inertia.
So these musings (not yours, The Guardian's), but kind of like "off with their heads" don't address the infrastructure cancer.
I live in the US btw and use the iOS Messages app. Don't have WhatsApp installed, even if my wife insists, on principle.
If Meta burns in flames or does something with WhatsApp, I won't feel a sting, but others will and much of the world along. I might miss FB Marketplace, that's the only reason I go there.
It's curious decoupling WhatsAPP isn't on EU's and others' agenda. If it is, but I haven't seen it.
Why care about the long term consequences if the world is going to be over in the next 20 years.
there is like literally no history to go off of here that indicates there could be consequences for mark or meta.
there is, however, kind of a lot of history showing nothing will happen to him or meta. and the conditions that enabled him to be consequence-free are exist in pretty much the entire judicial apparatus at this point.
it's not so much that it's doomerism as it is... just look at it. lol. we are sailing literally the opposite direction of accountability right now as a nation.
Just not rewarding flexing, but creating and world improving?
We should reward quality of engagement, not just length of it.
I just took a look, and it appears to have changed now though. At least, from the logged out perspective.
What is the author's model of a company?
The CEO is the throughline in a history
of billion-dollar blunders
For comparison:
He outperformed the Nasdaq 100 which made 18% (plus dividends) in the same time.
And he way outperformed Warren Buffet who made 14% in the same time.
"Value" is a tough thing to translate. Market cap, and whatever. Considering the fact so many people express difficulty in deleting their accounts - it won't let you, or it gets reactivated later - I'm just going to state the quiet part out loud here; Facebook's valuation is mostly or entirely fraud
I very much doubt that they listen to countries in tier 1 and 2 also. If not for the fear of US's relatively stronger regulations, don't think Meta would even pay attention to any complaints in US either.
This would not change with the change in leadership in Meta simply because 18Bn is fairly affordable for Meta's scale, but they should be worried about setting the legal precedent (though they denied any wrong doing).
Other countries may not have the same ability to impose penalties owing to their weaker laws also.
> How many Tesla's investors have managed to cash out and how many of Facebook's advertisers managed to turn a profit?
It me. That said, I didn't buy TSLA because I was expecting to cash out a few years later when he started acting like a threat to democracy and his own judicial system; when I bought it I thought they had a good business model and I thought they were undervalued.
Now they're overvalued, have lots of visible competitors eating their lunch.
Worse, even if they succeed, given Musk has yet to pay out dividends on that stock and also enough control over the board to give him as many shares as he wants, I think even success would render the stock monopoly money.
If you think Meta is bad now, just wait until Zuck is replaced by a soulless, profit-obsessed corporate CEO whose primary job is maximizing shareholder profit. Meta as a company can get far worse.
People should really be careful what they wish for.
Split it up as with AT&T Bell or Standard Oil, or stop complaining.
Some of the baby bells got back together again.
>
> But if Meta is truly interested in prioritizing the safety of users [...]
Where did that "but" clause come from? Has that ever been a priority?
Looking at the this picture & share holder value, Zuck is a successful CEO. I doubt any Meta insider would like Zuck to step-down.
I for one, would like Meta to crash & burn. People need to be free of its influence.
In the US: 25–34 years: Around 25.7% to 25.9% (the largest single demographic group).
Interestingly I did learn of a niche which is completely unserved except by Meta recently: child-locked messaging apps.
Messenger for Kids basically does everything you want it to - restricted functionality, restricted contact lists etc. I won't use it, but I only found out about it because I was hoping someone had built a Signal client which did exactly that.
> Data subjects must be allowed to withdraw this consent at any time, and the process of doing so must not be harder than it was to opt in.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
There is also FB specific:
> In November 2023, Meta introduced a binary ‘Consent or Pay' advertising model. (…)
> The Commission found that this model is not compliant with the DMA, as it did not give users the required specific choice to opt for a service that uses less of their personal data but is otherwise equivalent to the ‘personalised ads' service.
Source: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
Why would it be interested in that? It's interested in increasing shareholder profits.
> It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta
What, like in the leadership of a political party? Meta does not work for the public good; if anything, it's rather the opposite. And it's not like another one of their people would change course and work and make it a public benefit company.
I’d be happy to see Meta gone altogether, but unless I missed the memo, Meta isn’t particularly upset about what it’s been up to (beyond bland press releases).
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Building something as described in that article would cause people to drop all of the existing platforms almost overnight.
All in all, it is actually one app that is beneficial or at least harmless.
Today on the shadow libraries, you have your pick of a number of self-teaching textbooks for free, allowing you to find an approach that fits your learning style. No need to rely on a dodgy corporate app.
> Today on the shadow libraries, you have your pick of a number of self-teaching textbooks for free
No, self teaching textbooks are not better for me.
What people don't like is huge masses of people coming together and having opinions that counter our modern mainstream elite consensus. Because elites are generally pretty smart that means a lot of these opinions are, frankly, dumb. Some of them simply represent different values (pro vs anti immigration, as one example.) Both are considered intolerable.
It is also perfectly true that people spend lots of time on non-politicized content. Baby videos, cat videos, feel-good human interest stories, all sorts of positive stuff is also massively popular on these platforms. That gets ignored in favor of inveighing for tight control over the political discourse because social media spreads crimethink.
The Western democratic ideal is that you have to convince the masses you're right - a disturbingly large portion of the movers and shakers have decided that instead, we should control what the masses are allowed to say and know, so we don't have to fight those battles.
There is a malaise in the west and Meta is just a symptom. More institutional power is a bad idea when institutions are dysfunctional.
So I have to assume it's dead
So nah, most don't. I know some do, but the main socialisation isn't happening there.
The solution to this whole thing has been obvious since the start: Put the power where it belongs, with the user agent (browser), by making the Do Not Track signal legally enforceable.
I'm very pro-Brussels but they've made an absolute hash of this whole thing. Cookie banners are ruining the web, which is the only open app ecosystem we have.
It’s easy, let them track you and don’t clear cookies. Be clear about your consent to tracking; then you don’t see cookie banners.
Looks like there is even an extension for that: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/i-dont-care-about-c...
PS: Using a Chromium-based browser would be like begging to surrender what's left of the software freedom that I just described.
About my experience, I am relatively happy with the current state of affairs. I don't want websites to use my personal information without my consent. I still like the cookie banners more than ads, in particular ads that follow me across websites and accounts. Also note that many websites don't track their users - and these don't have cookie banners.