https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/the-investigations-and-rep...
https://youtu.be/4SrxqfKn9Bw?t=1605
I think Facebook has very little choice right now. Libra could have been a moat, but it is more or less dead now. They are being cornered into being more pro-conservative, because otherwise their moat (engagement, which is what advertisers pay for) will collapse by the time COVID is done. They need to walk the fine line between proving their engagement and hoping that advertisers would actually want to show ads to the group which is engaged.
What makes you say this? I don’t quite follow.
If there is one thing you don't want to be right now, it is a small business owner fighting to bring employees back to work in an unsafe environment while operating at reduced capacity. What's the incentive for the employee to return to work? Jim Cramer said it well on CNBC when he asked how he can compete with the federal government to bring people back to work:
https://youtu.be/qG_Nq7kIojI?t=367
This is Jim Cramer we are talking about. He can probably even afford to overpay (and outbid the federal government) for a while to bring back his restaurant staff. Regular small businesses don't enjoy such advantages.
When these small businesses start rolling over one by one, there will just be a lot fewer small businesses left. And those who do survive will probably shrink their ad budgets.
I once heard a funny comment: Google shows you ads for stuff you know you want to buy. Facebook shows you ads for stuff you didn't know you want to buy (search intent of course). I would say search intent will drive ad spend for the foreseeable future. Plus, if it is a secular bear market for small businesses, ad rates on Google would also come down for those small businesses which do make it out alive at the end of COVID.
Virtue signaling is cheap.
Is there any evidence that they've specifically cut more from Facebook than from other social media platforms?
Continuity in marketing metrics can also be important.
And yet every new highschool cohort has a new social media app.
These are simple CRUD apps and anyone can make them. The tech is only getting more accessible. Look at the ages of people launching these things. Young people get young people.
Facebook is for grandmas yelling at liberals. TikTok is exiting and fresh. In four years, it'll be something new.
Of the many failed attempts to make social media apps, the ones I'm most aware of seem to have all failed due to mismanagement (vine, voat, yikyak).
Look at the proliferation of dating apps. Not even Tinder is the end-all be-all. There are new entries in that field all the time, and it's hyper adjacent to social media.
I don't think either industry is a good place to build a moat. You have to keep buying the upstarts to win.
The engineer joined the company in 2016 and most recently worked on Instagram. He left the company on Wednesday. One employee on an internal thread seen by BuzzFeed News said that they received permission from the engineer to say that the dismissal “was not voluntary.”
This seems to be the latest in a pretty long series of actions that seem contrary to that idea and that something else might be the real motivating factor.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512...
Facebook is no different than any other Delaware corporation. Facebook exists to do anything and everything that will profit its shareholders. Everything else is just PR.
Source: if you look at the articles of incorporation for my solely-owned and operated LLC, you'd find an identical purpose statement.
Zuckerburg regularly hangs out with conservative political figures, but not liberal or letist ones. [0]
They censor the left regularly [1]. Also, is there even any leftist publications in the FB news tab?
They let the right slide by on things regularly though. They don't censor racism. [2] And they apparently have a bias that allows right publications to break their rules.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-holding-priv...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/24/facebook-whil...
[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employ...
https://heated.world/p/fact-check-of-viral-climate-misinform...
My interpretation of this is not that Facebook has a conservative bias (what does it even mean for a company to have a bias?), but that Facebook's leaders are well aware that the company are extremely vulnerable to regulation, and that keeping the current administration sweet is a good way of evading regulation. If the US enters 2021 with a Democratic administration not hamstrung by a Republican congress, i would expect the apparent bias to evaporate or reverse.
It would mean that the company's actions benefit members of one side of the political spectrum more than the other.
We're free to speculate about why a company's actions might do that and whether it's deliberate or an emergent consequence of some other intention, but I think it's fairly straightforward to define what bias would mean.
