When Mark Zuckerberg presented his company’s third-quarter results earlier this week, the focus was not on Facebook’s Files or Papers, nicknames given to information leaked about the platform over the past month.
The growth in revenue, essentially advertising, was lower than projected by market analysts. And the CEO’s villains in the presentation were Apple and TikTok.
The first started to require applications that use its operating system, such as Facebook and Instagram, to ask users if they accept to be monitored.
As a result, advertisers now have a harder time reaching—and knowing they’ve reached—their target audience. Hence, they reduce advertising expenses and start looking for alternatives, such as acquiring media vehicles and their user and subscriber bases.
TikTok, on the other hand, appears month after month as the most downloaded app and is pulling out the “young adults” who converged on Zuckerberg’s platforms, now taken over by “older people” — expressions used by the CEO himself.
Neither problem is new. Zuckerberg had already been attacking TikTok for its Chinese origin, even posing with the American flag, and Apple with a campaign that included a newspaper advertisement.
When users’ consent to monitoring began to be required months ago, there were entire pages of WSJ, New York Times, Washington Post and Financial Times. In one statement, “We are standing up to Apple in defense of small businesses everywhere” (above).
On both fronts, it didn’t work. But the larger response to Apple and TikTok was already being prepared, as could be seen in the rumor surrounding “metaverse” months ago in Facebook coverage.
And on Thursday Zuckerberg appeared with the name change of the holding, to Meta Platforms or just Meta, and above all with a new attraction for advertisers and young adults.
As the WSJ has bluntly warned, it’s a new guise for something that “has already existed and failed”, Second Life. But this time it could be different, given advances in technology.
For Meta, as the company wants to be called, the important thing is to offer an alternative for the future, different from the current perspective of platforms populated by “older people” and with a business model strangled by Apple and Google.
Instead of iOS, your Oculus (now also Meta). Instead of TikTok, its Horizon Worlds.
None of this is related to the scandal this past month, which increased the charge for state intervention, either to expand control of its content, or to divide the company, which would have to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp.
The problem is that Democrats and Republicans have opposing ideas about what to do. Projects presented by the former focus on holding Facebook accountable for promoting misinformation.
In the case of a bill by Republican senator Marco Rubio, Facebook would be held responsible for censoring political views, as it did with Donald Trump. Others, independents, fear any imposition on content and advocate antitrust actions.
In the current state of American institutions, there is nothing to indicate that it is possible to reach consensus. And now Meta moves on, regulated or constrained only by competition from other Big Techs.
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