To the sound of gasps and ‘What?’ across the interwebs, some with a tone of sarcastic inevitability, Meta announced that they would stop their ‘third party fact-checking contracts’ and waffled on about free speech.
Now I could go into all the political schoolyard pushing and shoving that is going on in Washington all to curry favour from a certain person who recently threatened life imprisonment for Mark Zuckerberg. Or I could muse about how tech billionaires are in a rush to cozy up to this certain person in the hope of an oligarchic windfall, but I won’t.
I do not have time for things that are not on my professional radar.
No, I need to spend my time and energy making money from Meta ad sales. I am part of a marketing sector that relies on creating strategies for other businesses that rely on sales through Facebook and Instagram.
So anything that affects one of the platforms I work on, it’s a big deal. And I need to pay attention. We all do.
There is a whole ecosystem of retailers and marketing services that feed into and create success stories in Facebook’s marketplace and advertising service.
Facebook is not Twitter. Facebook was built to be a strong platform with a great (if overly complex) advertising infrastructure. Its whole engagement ecosystem is multifaceted to keep a consistently large diverse group on the platform. And It works.
But the one huge weakness it has is the same as what all social media platforms have. Reputation.
Twitter / X had a weaker, less, focused business model and so its demise was swift after Elon Musk scrapped all the protections that would have preserved its reputation.
Facebook’s demise, if it wishes to follow Musk into the void, will take a little longer. But make no mistake, it will fall into the void.
Reputation in business is a core jewel that needs to be protected at all costs. Back in the 90s Gerald Ratner, the CEO of the highly successful Ratner Jewellers, spoke in an unrelated press conference that his products were ‘complete crap’ and of ‘lesser quality than a prawn sandwich.’ Within 2 years, after that completely unforced remark, the company and all 330 stores were gone.
Much like those people who decided in disgust to shop for jewelry elsewhere, if you are a small company that sells stuff via social media, do you want to be associated with the kind of sludge and dregs of humanity that remains on Twitter / X? No.
In X, no one can tell if a link is safe or if it leads to a fake shop or scam sales funnel.
This is why we see a collapse in advertising revenue on X and rapidly becoming a worthless business. Certainly worthless for my business to operate in.
And soon it feels like the world will look at Facebook in the same way. This affects me.
I took a gap day at this point in writing this article.
In that single day as the floodgates opened, I could already see the slander, the terrible AI fakes and the horribleness suddenly appearing in my feeds. Mark Zuckerberg posted a sad lamentation on the apparent loss of masculinity in men in the same way that all far right parasites preach. But how do I know this is a real post? If I read a blatantly fake post and directly underneath my advert is placed. I would be properly annoyed.
The question is, is this just a passing thing? Am I worrying too much about this? Is this new policy just a temporary fever dream of a bored billionaire that will be eventually checked by the shareholders anyhow?
Long-term Investors and creditors will not like anything that could hit its bottom line but it is hard to say. The deregulation announcement also shared the spotlight regarding the relocation of Meta to Texas. This move will pacify short-term Meta investors as moving to a tax-free state and all the subsequent cost reductions that come with axing working conditions is a core pillar of the fiduciary responsibility of the CEO and CFO on behalf of the shareholders. So I doubt any pushback will happen from them. That was a clever move.
We can only sit back and watch it all unfold. I guess it is healthy for any business like mine to occasionally stop, sit up and look around at the environment in which they operate, to see if there are any new players that would be worth investigating. Reddit, though not new by any means, has an advertising platform that is seldom talked about. So has Pinterest.
So in the next few days and weeks I need to find these rising star platforms like Bluesky. I think I will make a separate article about alternate lesser-known social marketplaces on the web.
So what do you think about the Meta announcement?
P.S.- We have started recording podcasts on relevant topics to our business and this article was used as a reference to create a conversation. You can check the podcast video below:
