Status update

Meta has real world problems

On February 4, 2004, a little website was set up by a group of friends at Harvard University. Its premise was simple: Students at the university could create a brief and basic profile and upload their photographs. They could then message one another publicly (on a “wall”) or privately. Within a few years, Facebook became a globe-spanning social network; and, another few years later, it turned capable of shaking governments and distorting election campaigns. Twenty years on, from the first profile photograph being uploaded to what was then “thefacebook.com”, Facebook has become “Meta”, with a stable of products that includes WhatsApp and Instagram. Extraordinarily, it had never returned money to its shareholders through a dividend; but last week it, for the first time, authorised a payment of 50 cents per share to its investors. This came alongside news that revenue in the fourth quarter of 2023 rose by 25 per cent, to over $40 billion, tripling its net income to $14 billion. At the end of 2023, it was sitting on over $65 billion of cash.

Facebook, in other words, has reached the age of maturity. It is no longer exciting and new; it is not where new social media narratives are created or stars are born. But it certainly remains the basic underpinning of much social media narrative management by politicians, by companies, and by extremists of all stripes. A network built for the hothouse environment of an Ivy League university has struggled, over the past decade in particular, to manage the real world. Shortly before his company announced its unexpectedly positive results, Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg had to face a grilling — his eighth — from politicians in his own country, the United States. The highlight was certainly his awkward apology to parents who had lost their children to sexual exploitation or bullying through social media. In Facebook’s decades-long march to maturity, it appears quite clear that many individual casualties have been left by the wayside.

Later this year, the United States will endure a presidential election that is likely to be a festival of misinformation. Since at least 2016 — the year of the Brexit referendum and of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign — it has been obvious that all social media, but perhaps particularly Facebook, is dangerously amenable to manipulation. And that such manipulation is capable of altering the path of history. But Big Tech’s response to this knowledge has been oddly weak. Some platforms like Twitter — now known as “X” — seem to have essentially embraced revenue-generating possibilities of misinformation, with its new owner firing practically the entire content moderation team and ending the system of reliable, verified accounts. Others, like Facebook, retain moderation teams — but have visibly understaffed those teams that deal with vernacular languages or foreign countries, often places where Facebook is also by far the most influential news source. The retail damage that social media can do, meanwhile, is visible also on Instagram, which, some fear, is sparking a mental health crisis among young people; and on WhatsApp, which has become a fake news force multiplier. Meta is today a successful, cash-rich company — but one with few friends in politics or regulation. Its next 20 years may be even more eventful.