Better Offline - We're Watching Facebook Die

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

For three years, Facebook's monthly active users have been declining dramatically, with Facebook.com losing 397 million unique monthly visitors since May 2021. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how Mark Zuckerberg's abominable growth-at-all-costs mindset has turned Facebook into a dystopia of AI-generated slop, dangerous misinformation and outright pornography, all as a result of Zuckerberg's intentionally harmful approach to social media.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Also Media. Hello, welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. Last episode, I walked you through how Mark Zuckerberg and his top people intentionally ruined Facebook and have been doing the same thing with Instagram, what you're probably wondering is what the net effects of that are, and they're not great. In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion, of which $12.37 billion was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric,

family daily active people. This number, which could also be the name of a gym, refers to registered and logged in users of one or more of Facebook's family products who visited at least one of these products on a particular day. This, again, seemingly innocent change to how Facebook reports growth is quite significant in that Facebook will no longer have to report its daily or monthly active users, meaning that the only source of truth in Meta's growth story is an extremely very very very very very very very very. growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything. Though Meta doesn't really explain this number anywhere,

3 billion daily active people across Meta's family could combine WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Facebook portal, Oculus, threads, and maybe some other dead Facebook product that they forgot to kill off of the app store. I'm not really sure, and it's not like they tell us. What's confusing is that in their fourth quarter, 2023 earnings, Meta reported that it had 2.11 billion daily active users across its properties, a number that is somehow distinct from the 3.19 billion family daily active people

that they reported in the same quarter. Daily active users is a fairly simple metric. It's how many people engage with a product in a given day on average across the month, or the quarter, I guess. But daily family active people is a number that's somehow so distinct that it's a billion users higher. It smells. It smells like doo-doo to me. I'll digress. When a company starts playing these weird games with how they report user activity,

something's going very, very wrong. In general, when a company tries to obfuscate the true numbers about their revenue, growth or profit, it's one of the worst signs, and Enron is probably the best example of it, with the company's notorious use of esoteric metrics in their quarterly financial statements being used to disguise the fact that they were over-leveraged, dysfunctional. and hemorrhaging money. While I don't really want to draw the comparisons between Meta and Enron, there's an

undeniable truth in the adage that if you have nothing to hide you, have nothing to fear. Healthy, stable, functional companies, they don't feel the need to move the goalposts or create new, weird metrics. They just don't. It's a very, very bad sign. Between the first quarter of 2021 and the fourth quarter of 2023, which was the last one where reported metrics actually came from Meta, the country. the company would increase its daily active users by 230 million and its monthly active users by 220 million.

That's a growth rate of just under 11% in daily actives and just over a 7% increase in monthly actives in three years. In that time period, Meta launched its Horizon Metaverse and its Twitter competitor threads, which it claimed in its Q4 earnings in 2023 had hit 130 million monthly active users, which was an increase of 30% over the third quarter. Yet between the third and fourth quarters, Meta's overall monthly active users across their platforms only increased by around 20 million.

And this heavily suggests that despite adding over 100 million new monthly active users on the property, it's shedding tens of millions of them everywhere. Meta's entire product strategy revolves around growth of these arbitrary metrics, time spent on app, engagement, meaningful time spent, all numbers that have dictated their strategy across a multitude of properties like Facebook and Instagram for years. And thanks to these really nasty growth tactics and

a sheer force of capital and monopolies, meta has grown an pretty much unstoppable position in social networking, controlling two of the major platforms, Instagram and Facebook, and two prevalent messaging services in WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Yet Meta has become a company that just shows contempt for users, and they turn their products, Facebook and Instagram in particular, into these horrible algorithmic nightmares that undermine their core purpose. They don't connect people, they intentionally allow malignant actors like anti-vaxes and spammers to thrive on there, and they make it harder to see the things that you want to see to send these arbitrary metrics upwards.

Mark Zuckerberg, he lied. He lied to investors when he told them that his company doesn't build services to make money, but makes money to build better services, because for over a decade, matter has allowed its services to decay while actively monetising the frustration, pain and confusion, created by the horror show that is meta.

When you look at Instagram or Facebook, I want you to look at me a little different for me, just for a moment. I want to view them not as social networks, but as a kind of anthropological experimentation. Every single thing, you see on either of these platforms is built or selected to make you spend more time on the app and see more things that matter wants you to see like ads or sponsored contents or suggested

groups that you can interact with. And in doing so, you're increasing your time spent on the app and increasing the amount of meaningful interactions you have with the content. Now, what's important there is you'll notice I'm not saying anything about you enjoying it or liking here or being able to get to stuff or anything about a service. That's because that isn't why it's there. Indeed, I want you to realize that anything bad or frustrating you see on the platform is a direct symptom of Mark Zuckerberg's unwillingness to rate limit or really moderate the platform. Logically speaking, one would think the meta would want you to have a high-quality Facebook experience and they'd want a prudent content that, I don't know, might be incendiary, spammy, scammy,

unhelpful, or at the very least from someone you know and want to hear from. But when your only concern is growth, content moderation is more of an emergency measure or just something you talk about in earnings or in front of Congress. And to be clear, this is all part of Meta's cultural DNA. In an interview with journalist Jeff Horwitz and his book, Broken Code, Facebook's VP of Ads and Partnerships, Brian Boland, said that building things is way more fun than making things secure and safe. And until there's a regulatory press fire, you don't deal with it. Horwitz also cites that Metta's engineer's greatest frustration was that the company perpetually needed something to fail,

often fucking spectacularly, and that is a quote, to drive interest in fixing it. Horwitz's book describes Meta's approach to moderation as having a light touch, considering it a moral virtue, and that the company wasn't failing to supervise what users did, it was neutral. As I briefly explained, the logic here is that the more stuff there is on Facebook or Instagram, the more likely you aren't to run into something you'll interact

with, even if said interaction is genuinely bad. Hulwitz notes that in April's 2016, meta-analyze Facebook's most successful political groups, finding that a third of them routinely featured content that was racist and conspiracy-minded. With their growth heavily driven by Facebook's group you should join and discover features, algorithmic tools that Facebook used to recommend content, the researcher in question added that 64% of all extremist group joins are due to Facebook's recommendation tools. Now, here's something that will really annoy you, at least it annoyed me. When the researcher in question took their concerns to Facebook's protect and care team,

and that is their name, they were told that there was nothing the team could do as, and I quote, the accounts creating the content were real people, and Facebook intentionally had no rules mandating truth, balance, or good faith. Cool! That's the thing. Every time I read one of these things, I just want to do. scream. Because this is how this company runs. There are many evil companies out there, but it's so rare you read text that it's just like, yeah, so if we do this, it will be good for people.

And someone just says, nah, you don't want to, don't want to do that, bring the numbers down. It's so strange and it's so craven. And it's so often as well. And this is only a tiny subset of the, I imagine, tens of millions of emails at meta. There's probably so much worse that's going to come out one day. It drives me insane. But I get back to the point, which is that meta at its core is a rot economy empire and it's entirely engineered to grow metrics and revenue at pretty much the expense of anything else. In practice, this means allowing almost any activity that might grow the platform, even if it means that groups ballooned by tens or hundreds of thousands of people a day, or allowing people to friend 50 or more people in a single day, even if it's obvious spam. it means allowing almost any content other than that which it's legally required to police, like mutilation or child pornography, which, thank God they get rid of.

I'm actually surprised that they take the action there. And it's just, it's very depressing. And even in the worst cases, they're extremely hesitant to intervene. This is why, by the way, when you log on to Facebook, you can find multiple groups with the most bizarre names, but I picked a particularly weird one. search for Facebook complaints. When you look, you'll find thousands of members in, I think, like 20 different groups. All people that believe they're talking to Facebook customer support,

but what they're really doing is engaging with the most obvious scammers in the world, asking to go private on Facebook Messenger. These groups are a great example about meta's total lack of any quality control, and it's just utter contempt for their users. typing Facebook complaint into a search bar on the Facebook app should, if Meta gave a shit, direct you, I don't know, to Facebook's customer service department. And that would be if one really existed, which it does not, which we will get to later. Instead, it introduces you to multiple, and I've seen one, there's one group that had 17,000,

one had 5,000, there's multiple groups with at least 1,000 people. And they're honey traps, they're obvious honey traps for scam artists. And meta doesn't get rid of them, I imagine, because these groups have relatively high activity boosting Facebook's meaningful interactions. Even if said interactions are a 75-year-old being conned into sharing their username and password via Facebook Messenger, or an irate Australian claiming that hackers have changed his Facebook to Chinese, or another person that I saw that was genuinely saying, I ordered lobster, where is it? I don't know on that one, mate. I just don't know. Like most social networks, and you'll see this with Twitter and Google in particular, even though Google,

I realized not social network in this case. These companies, they have a kind of a black box approach to customer service, meaning that when you submit or a complaint or a problem or a query through these regular channels, you're rarely going to get a substantive response or any help of any kind. What makes Meta unique is that they actively monetize the problem. In March 2023, Meta launched paid verification, charging users $15 a month to get a verified badge on their account, exclusive stickers as well, and I quote as direct access to customer support, which really has,

you got to wonder, hey, what does Facebook think they're providing otherwise? Is it not Facebook doing their support? I'm just guessing, man, because it's not like it's not the bloody website. It's just very annoying. It's very annoying and it's very, it turns my stomach. It really does. It's because customer support should be just a given, especially when you're a company that makes tens of, well, over $10 billion of profit a quarter, it's really frustrating.

And as shameless as it is, it's also just profoundly unimaginative. As I've argued in the past, both on this podcast and in my newsletter, by the way, Mark Zuckerberg is a man bereft of ideas. Meta is a company bereft of ideas. They stole Twitter's pivot. They stole Elon Musk's paid verification idea, which, in its first few moments, allowed pranksters to impersonate multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical multinationals and white billions from their stock valuation. And it just kind of shows Mehta's willingness to scrape from the

bottom of the barrel, even if it's just an horrible idea and also just a very noxious one. Like, yeah, we'll help you, mate, if you pay $15 a month for our website that we heavily monetize to such an extent that you can barely get anything done on it. Good Lord. But as I've kind of suggested, for meta, any group is an opportunity for engagement, and any content is an opportunity for engagement, and any action taken on the platform is a meaningful one. Anything that keeps a person engaged with Instagram or Facebook, even if it's bad for the user, is a good thing.

And that mentality pervades the entirety of this asshole company. To quote Facebook VP Andrew Boz Bosworth in a memo from 2016, and Boz is now the CTO of Meta, by the way. Anything that allows this. company to connect more people more often is de facto good. And all the work that this company does in growth is justified, including questionable contact importing practices and subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends, by which he meant terms and condition changes. While Mark Zuckerberg might have claimed that Meta never believed the ends justify

the means when this memo came out and when BuzzFeed asked him, and stop him from making Bosworth Meta's CTO in 2022. or for that matter, from doing anything else for nakedly evil. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel,

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Who's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right?

That's the name. The Harvard Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app,

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Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and. and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Hey, everyone. It's Ryder Strong and Wilfredel from PodMeets World. And now the Podmeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered dancing with the stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of

survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Like what was just because we? Yeah.

We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of ha, who. Ha ha, ha, who. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune in a PodMeets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes.

Listen to PodMeets Tworold on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Meta's growth at all cost mindset means that both Facebook and Instagram incentivize the creation of more stuff, far more than they incentivize any kind of meaningful interaction of any kind. And as I've mentioned previously, both of them have algorithms that aggressively force sponsored and suggested content onto users based on this unknowable leviathan of data points. One particularly noxious engagement trick Facebook uses is to show a carousel of reels, short vertical videos, but instead of playing the entire thing,

you're showing a two or three second loop of the content in the hopes that you'll be intrigued enough to click. This kind of design decision is entirely built to create more engagement. Now it could just play the videos in their entirety and let you view them, maybe click through and hear the sound if you were interested. But Facebook is built to please Mark Zuckerberg

and his nasty, dirty little numbers game. It's gross. Yet by incentivizing as much content and as many interactions as possible, rather than curating the experience in any way, Facebook is being killed. It's being destroyed in real time. A study out of Stanford and Georgetown University found that AI-generated images have begun to dominate Facebook,

garnering hundreds of millions of interactions, thanks to Meta's recommendation algorithms, with one AI-generated image becoming one of the 20 most viewed pieces, of content in the third quarter of 2023. These pages, according to the study, regularly, and I quote, used click-baked tactics and attempted to direct users to off-platform content farms and low-quality debanes, and scam pages that attempted to sell products that do not exist or to get users to divulge personal details.

I don't know if you remember in the previous episode, but I mentioned that Facebook has made changes like this before, promoting clickbait content that doesn't tell you what it is, really, until you click it. In essence, MERS' algorithm is actively monetizing sending users to questionable groups that, according to the study, used known deceptive practices such as account theft or takeover to spread these horrible images, and that these accounts exhibited suspicious follower growth, showing them ads through the entire experience. 404 media's Jason Kobler also analyzed the phenomena and found that groups were using

AI altered pictures of Simon Cowell to direct people toward a page called Thoughts, which routinely encouraged people to click through to a spammy website called Planetry, planeti, which was in turn full of horrible invasive ads. Kobler also found that Planeti and Thoughts dramatic growth began when they started using these AI-generated images and that many other groups were doing the same thing, and they were generating these bizarre images like a picture of Jesus made of shrimp or an AI-generated picture of an 121-year-old woman celebrating her birthday. And this image, by the way, her eyes are like smudges.

It does not look real. But these AI-generated image, they're running absolutely rampant on the platform, or because meta has absolutely no duty towards their users or even the platform itself. 404 Media also reported recently that Facebook's recommendation algorithm is now promoting anime pornography, combining a mixture of AI-generated cartoon porn and plagiarized artwork to garner tens of thousands of likes, and reporter Jason Kobler mentioned that a user complained that they'd been shown nude pictures of Disney princesses and Misty from Pokemon. This is particularly grotesque when you realize how many children use Facebook.

Although Facebook's relevance has kind of waned with GenC and younger, it's still a major social network property in this demographic. A report from 2021 found that 45% of kids under the age of 13 use Facebook daily and speaks to a larger trend of recklessness within this company. Going back to when an engineer was fired after raising concerns that Facebook's People You May Know feature allowed, and I quote, millions of paedophiles to target tens of millions of children. I guess matter just doesn't really give a shit as long as the number goes up.

It doesn't matter that Facebook's algorithm is actively recommending AI-generated images of mutilated children. gathering hundreds of thousands, if not millions of engagements. It's also that Facebook can serve your ads next to them. It doesn't matter that Facebook is saturated with engagement bait, much of it created with generative AI because Meta is able to express that it has 3 billion or more family daily active people. Whatever the hell that means, on the platform,

even if it means that these 3 billion daily active people, and I really question whether it's actually 3 billion people, even if they're watching this thing fall apart in real time. Yet, arguably the most confusing addition to the platform in any recency is meta AI, a free and impossible to disable, by the way, artificial intelligence assistant that uses generative AI to answer user questions

and generate images from virtually any Facebook property. Meta also allows users to add Meta's AI to their groups, letting commenters ask it questions, but they also did something really weird. They've allowed you to add it to the group and respond to comments that aren't getting enough engagement, which led Meta's AI to respond to a comment in a parenting group that it, referring to Metas AI,

had a gifted child and recommended a specific school for helping with their child's needs. And when I say there, I'm referring to a generative AI on the Facebook platform. It's so strange. It's all so strange. And you know what? It doesn't make any sense

until you consider that every single decision that Mark Zuckerberg makes is to keep users on Meta's platforms. By adding a generative AI assistant, meta gives users more things to play with, more reasons to interact with the platform and more ways to generate content to put onto the platform,

which in turn creates more reasons for others to interact with it. It doesn't matter that the things being created are useless or harmful or profoundly inane or intrusive or annoying, or that by giving people the ability to lazily generate posts, which all kind of sound the same, because all generative AI is trained on basically the same datasets,

except by the way, Facebook's is trained on Facebook data. You're just going to normalize everything on there. Everything already kind of sucks on Facebook, but now generative AI will allow it to suck in greater numbers. This is the future, everyone. Now, this nonsensical act of pushing AI onto Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp and all these things, it's just another silly, senseless way that Mark Zuckerberg is burning money. And meta is raising its spending forecast in 2024 to $35 billion to $45 billion, which is up from $30 to $37 billion.

Zuckerberg's blown over $40 billion on the Metaverse so far and seems to be intent on doing the same thing with AI. and he's going to sink billions more into graphics processing units and other assorted hardware to spin up features that nobody wants, that nobody asks for, that every time I've seen someone discuss, they are saying something along the lines of, why is this here, or why do I need this, and I don't want this?

I have never seen such an unpopular product other than the metaverse. I think genuinely had the metaverse been easier to access, it would have been even more unpopular than this. but let's be honest, it's already pretty unpopular already. Not to sound too dramatic, but I believe that meta is a deeply evil company, and it's run by people that treat human beings as pawns, pawns to increase engagement metrics and make money on advertising. And what makes the company so unique is that the services it provides

are just unquestionably awful. Using both Facebook and Instagram is a battle with an algorithm to see the people that you choose to follow, and meta as a company seems incapable of developing anything new, innovative, or even useful. Yet it made over $36 billion in revenue in Q1, 2024, and it did so by abusing and manipulating its users, while also failing to maintain any integrity or utility within two of the most important platforms on the internet.

And I believe, as crazy as it sounds, that this strategy will lead to the contraction and eventual death of Facebook, at the very least, and possibly Instagram. and I anticipate that as things get more difficult for the company, it's going to hit Instagram so much worse. According to data provided to me by Similar Web, in the last three years, Facebook's US website audience has declined by 13.7%.

And in the year-over-year period from April 20203 to 2024, monthly active users on Facebook's app have declined by 2.2%. While Instagram's web audience grew by 23% over the last few years, in the last 12 months, its growth has slowed to 6.8%. And between March and April, 2024, Instagram's app monthly active users in America, declined by 0.8%.

Instagram's the cash cow. This is the thing to be worried about, Mark. Facebook's monthly active users have been aggressively declining every month, though. Tumbling from a high of 208 million monthly active users in May 2021 to 161 million monthly active users in April 24. And just to be clear, talking about the website there.

And that's the second lowest the number has been in the entire period, beaten only by February 2024, when it had 158.8 million active users. On top of that, year-over-year, Facebook's apps saw a decline of 2.2% in monthly active users. To put it simply, Facebook's decaying, and they've lost nearly 50 million monthly active users in the last three years in the US to their website. Globally, things are a lot worse. Facebook has lost 25.2% of its monthly unique website visitors since 2021, crashing from a high of 1.456 billion in May 2021

to a low of $1.04 billion in February 2024, slightly increasing to $1.05 billion in April 2024, a loss of 397 million unique monthly visitors. One has to wonder if these numbers might have been what pushed Zuckerberg to try and turn the metaverse into, and I quote, the next generation of the internet. Maybe he knew. Maybe he knew that his disgraceful, lazy, half-baked, abusive, shitty, morally reprehensible approach to building social networks was one that had a sell-by-date. Everything you see on Facebook and Instagram today is a monument to the works of a man that

sees users as rats in a digital maze built to make numbers go up and investors happy. and I don't even think he cares that much about investors. After all, he can't be fired. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman,

help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Who's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Huber me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again.

More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio. and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com.

Hey everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Wilfridell from PodMeets World. And now the Podmeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor.

I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Like what was just because we? Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion of the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of ha-hoo.

Ah, ha, who. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune into Pod Meets World for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to PodMeets Tworled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've seemed very angry in these episodes. I'm not telling you how to feel. I'm just telling you how I feel.

And a lot of this comes down to a deep frustration with Facebook and Instagram and meta as a company. Because when you see a company with so much talent, with so much influence, with so much responsibility, and you see how little responsibility they feel to the people that use their website, It's just disgusting, especially when even the slightest changes could make these websites so much better, maybe a little less profitable, but after all, this company makes over $10 billion in profit a quarter, kind of like Google. Hey, I should do an episode on those people. Maybe I will in the future.

But in all seriousness, what meta stands for right now is rot, and what Mark Zuckerberg stands for is evil. You know, it's just society's mechanisms, they're far too slow and they lack the precision to deal with a man like Mark Zuckerberg. And he's a man that acts with just this shocking lack of morality, and I find it putrid. And this complex machine he's used to torture humans for profit and power, it's gone completely unchecked, a lot of government hand-waving, but no real changes. The best hope we have is the EU.

And as I've mentioned before, Mark Zuckerberg, he can never be fired. stuck with him, and he can and he will run this company into the goddamn ground, and he will hurt people on the way to doing it. While Elon Musk, and just to be clear, he is a greedy, churlish, nasty, freakish, disgusting, shameful man, Mark Zuckerberg is just something entirely different. He's not stupid. He really isn't. And unlike Musk, he doesn't seem to have any compulsion for anyone to like him.

They occasionally put him in a chain or a normal person outfit or have him do barbecue to try and pretend he's human. Eh, seems kind of half-hearted in it. I can understand that, because that's not what turns Mark Zuckerberg on. I'm not making any suggestions about sexual proclivities. Please do not sue me. What I'm saying is Mark Zuckerberg craves numerical dominance, and he craves it at any cost. He must force human beings to use Facebook. And once they're there, he must make them move in a way that he wishes and do the things he wishes.

all so that he can see the number go up. Mark Zuckerberg will do whatever he wants because he built a system so that he could never be fired, giving him unilateral power over a monopoly he designed to chew through people's lives, turning them into fuel for Meta's money machine, and so he could get his rocks off looking at and the numbers go up. Make no mistake.

What Mark Zuckerberg has done is monstrous, both in its damage to society and its financial opulence. Facebook has made sense. so many people, so rich in so many ways, and offered a genuine societal service, and then it found every foreseeable way to monetize every corner of our goddamn lives. Facebook's culture is one of imprisonment and abuse, and it traps users in engagement loops that tangibly harm them, something that Facebook is both well aware of and intentionally not seeking to remedy.

And ultimately, the software itself, the software behind Facebook, which does have value in it, in how it connects so many people in so many ways, that software is a prisoner of Mark Zuckerberg, who may or may not have stolen the idea in the first place, making it just another piece of data he's extracted through deeply shitty means. At one point, Facebook was a social good,

something that contributed to meaningful connections between human beings separated by time and geography. During the Arab Spring, protesters in Cairo held up banners that read in a mixture of English and Arabic, Thank you Facebook. Similar sentiments were daubed onto the wall of the headquarters of Tunisia's Ministry of the Interior, reflecting its role as a facilitator on a neutral communications network. Facebook even, as leaked emails obtained by the Daily Beast revealed,

placed protester pages under special protection with a team providing 24-7 monitoring. That, by the way, was in the past. At least in this regard, Facebook seemed to understand its role in the world and was prepared to kind of step up and own it. It refused to bend the knee to Hosni Mubarak, and its horrible regime, and on January 25, 2011, was banned by the Egyptian government two days before it shut down the entire internet. People use VPNs to get back on it, but still, Facebook used to mean something. Today, Facebook is an example of everything wrong with the internet,

an algorithmic iron maiden that nakedly cons users every minute, a parasite that deprives creators of their audiences and users of their industry. Facebook has no principles or backbone, and it's no longer a reliable tool for connecting people as it once was during the pro-democracy protests I previously mentioned. Whereas once you could have made a plausible case that even underneath its flaws, Facebook had an ember of morality. A smidgen of a care. It gave a tiny bit of a fuck. It's just no longer a coherent position.

In a just world, Facebook, Instagram, all meta-properties would be public utilities, instead of becoming this weird algorithmic fixation of a very strange multi-billionaire weirdo. Sorry, I shouldn't have called Mark Zuckerberg a weirdo. You're right. That just isn't harsh enough. Mark Zuckerberg is a goddamn monster. Mark Zuckerberg is the opposite of what the tech industry should stand for. He's a monopolist that deliberately makes and proliferates bad software, and he makes the world worse for it.

Facebook and Instagram are insults to every single single. software engineer in the world, built to trick and swindle and harm rather than provide any service. What Facebook and Instagram have become is an insult to Silicon Valley. I may come off as a pessimist sometime, but I'm actually a broken-hearted romantic. There was a time that Facebook had a measurable, meaningful and good effect on my life and billions of other people's lives. There was a time this company had something behind it. And even then when I say this, I realized, 2008 was when people you may know went in. Maybe it was always this bad.

Maybe they were better at hiding it. But I'm not pessimistic about this company because I want to be. I'm not even a pessimist. I'm a fucking cynic because I've read these documents. I've seen the way that this company talks about the users. I've seen the way that Mark Zuckerberg has deliberately hurt them. I've seen them make changes or choose not to make changes in the case of Project Daisy because they wanted to keep things growing.

And they've done so in a way that's made so. many horrible assholes, so rich, and so many millions and billions of people miserable. And Mark Zuckerberg is the reason. He is the person that puts out some of the most popular and poorly made software in existence, and he does so in a way that will continue to hurt people until this company dies, or until he's somehow removed, which, as I've mentioned, is not possible. people in the tech industry, people in society as well, should exile Zuckerberg. He should not be welcomed in the circles of Silicon Valley.

He shouldn't be welcomed anywhere. This man owns a large chunk of Hawaii, make him piss off there and live alone. Oh, you can live with his family, obviously. Nevertheless, this man, he may not be a criminal, but he is a scumbag. He is a person that has deliberately made things worse, so that he can be richer, so that he can see a number go up. He is the Rot Emperor. And he deserves no good.

He deserves no happiness. And he deserves to have this platform taken away from him. But it's never going to happen. We don't have the government mechanisms to have someone like Mark Zuckerberg removed from power. And because Sean Parker so desperately protected Mark Zuckerberg's right to control everything, this is what you get. This is actually what a true. horrifying monopoly does. It hurts people. It manipulates people. It makes the worst people rich and

regular people poorer and sadder and more confused and more lost and more disconnected and more unaware of the world around them. It spreads conspiracies. It spreads lunacy. It makes people unhappy. And it does so that Mark Zuckerberg can add another fucking zero to another fucking bank account. And it turns my goddamn stomach. And I'm sorry, I realize across these episodes, I have been on one. I have been quite angry. I have been full of theory. I'm sorry if that isn't the right way to approach this. And I've really done my best to come at this from a researched and thoughtful perspective as well. But reading this stuff has just so deeply angered me. It's so deeply offended me. I did not know that tech companies could be this craven.

Or maybe I did, but I was kind of in denial. I don't know. But in reporting this, I have just been disgusted. And I've said stomach churning or turning or whatever it is a few times. And it's true, though. It is disgusting. I actually love tech. I love this stuff.

I find it intellectually interesting. Tech was how I got this job and many jobs before it. Tech was something that meant something. It was something about building great software and great hardware, ways to connect people, make people able to do more things. What Mark Zuckerberg stands for is a deep nihilism in tech, where it isn't about building better things or connecting more people, where it isn't about making the world better or more aware or more educated,

or giving them more access to more things. No. It's about decay. It's about rot. It's about growing nothing from nothing again and again. And now Facebook and Instagram are poisoned with generative AI bullshit. All thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, a man with no creativity other than that which makes people dance for him to increase numbers. This man is a goddamn disgrace, and his company is a disgrace too.

The world deserves better than Mark Zuckerberg. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.

Where's your ed.at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-Better-O-Line to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

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