Meta's shift, and why it will hit a wall

Zuck so desperately wants to follow in Musk's footsteps, but the economic reality will intrude and prevent the full shift to MAGA

Setting the stage

I have been ruminating on facebook Meta for some time. But about the same time that the election was formalized on January 6th, 2025 when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was going to go full MAGA with Facebook, and end any and all moderation of content on the Meta platforms (Facebook, Insta, Threads) replacing it with a Twitter-like¹ “community notes” feature, to alter the T’s and C’s to basically let all the worst fucking people on the planet get their rocks off by bashing gays and trans people, whilst spewing the worst of toxic masculinity.

I have heard a few people say that he’s going to do the full Twitter route that Musk executed. I will get to that in a bit, but first, let’s talk about a trend that has been happening.

In the beginning, a new app or service starts out and it is all daises and unicorns. The platform works great, and users get a lot of value out of it.

In this phase, the bulk of the funding comes from people called Venture Capitalists, and early investors. They are obscenely rich fucks who have won the lottery and gotten the big bux. Instead of doing humanitarian things with their wealth, they instead try to find more people like them who have an idea, fund it, with the hope of a big exit, and piling another hundo million bux into their coffers.

Lather, rinse repeat. This is how we get shitbirds like Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and others who are just the worst fucking human filth that has the business and main stream press going ga-ga over.

Anyhow, that is the early phase. This is where growth is prized more than any other attribute of a business.

Then these fat-fuck VC’s want an exit, because their war chests get lonely, and want more greenbacks to be piled in said chest so that when they go to one of their parties, they can measure themselves not by the size of their junk, but by how many zeros are in their net worth.

Really, the salt of the earth.

That is when the enshittification² begins. These fledgeling companies, often “unicorns³” begin to consider their exits, and that leads to having to figure out how to make money. Often that means building a framework to monetize that will feel grafted on, and incoherent.

The monetization that social media has defaulted to is to sell targeted advertising. And while Google is the masters of online display advertising, Facebook (and Meta) are worthy players in this space.

Once the knob for revenue is created, and in the case of Meta it is advertising, there commences an arc that is predictable and depressing.

At first, the company adjusts the product to show ever more advertisements to users. Tweaking algorithms, until you get to the point that what you originally signed up for on Facebook is something you almost never see anymore, but instead you see algorithmically tuned items to keep you scrolling with a heavy mix of advertisements in the stream.

As the user’s feed gets less what they want, the algorithms are further tuned to increase engagement, and thus improve the targeting of advertisements, driving rage in the audience.

About this time, the platform (Meta) begins to do the late stage enshittification by beginning to fleece and fuck over the advertisers. Suddenly it becomes more expensive to get ad placements, and the ad sales market gets more opaque, and more expensive.

At the end, nobody is happy, but this repeats ad nauseam.

That is a long intro to where we are today. While I am not on Facebook — having left in 2017 after the Cambridge Analytic debacle, I did drop in for about 6 months early in the Pandemic when I get really into RC cars, and the full enshittification was well underway.

Next Steps

Of course, now that the Zuck has thrown in the towel and gone full MAGA, in an attempt to mimic the wild-wild-west environment that Twitter has become, there are some parallels.

First, I direct you to a recent newsletter by Ed Zitron, who has been on the enshittification, and rot-economy tear lately (I do recommend that you subscribe, he’s amazeballs) in his piece titled “The Slop Society”

While his post isn’t solely about Meta, he does a good job laying out the changes and the implications. One of the most striking changes is the loosening of content standards, as well as giving up on moderation⁴, and removing a lot of the hateful speech prohibitions in their T’s and C’s.

This means that Meta has now "[gotten rid of] a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate," which in practice means that Meta now allows you to say that being gay is a mental illness or describe immigrants as "filth." Casey Newton at Platformer — who I have been deeply critical of (and will be later in this piece!) — has done an excellent job reporting on exactly how horrifying these policies are, revealing how Meta's internal guidelines allow Facebook users to say that trans people are both mentally ill and don't exist (to be clear, if you feel this way, stop reading and take a quick trip to the garage with your car keys), and included one of the most wretched things I've ever read: that Alex Schultz, Meta's CMO, a gay man, "suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights."

If you’ve been at all within the blast radius of the whole Trans discourse during the last election, and the petty slap-fights on Twitter, this will resonate as the left/right battle du jour. It is a pretty shitty place to be Trans on Twitter, and while Facebook wasn’t great, at least there were fig leaves of a policy to provide some cover.

No more.

Alas, the Trump restoration is unleashing the shittiness of the oligarch class.

Almost immediately, the worst of the worst on Facebook began crawling out from under their rocks, flexing their shit-takes and being horrible homunculi — as is their custom.

So, they want to emulate Twitter in the Musk era. But can they really?

The Problem with Facebook going full Twitter

Alas, I would love to say that the enshittification of Meta would end, and it would become just a glorified parody (albeit mush larger) than Twitter.

I do not believe it can.

You might be asking why?

First, let’s go back to the spring and summer of 2022, when Musk decided to on a lark buy Twitter. At first it had all the hallmarks of one of Musk’s favorite jokes, anything around the numbers 420. In this case, he made an offer to buy Twitter and take it private for $54.20 a share. His net worth at that time was about $200B, and he leveraged his own money (about $20B), some couch-cushion money from his billionaire peers, and a $13B bank loan to execute the deal.

While that is some real money, Twitter was never a great business. It had a couple of quarters that were profitable, but by and large it was a money pit. Partly this was because of the leadership of its founder Jack Dorsey. Jack was far more libertarian, and freedom oriented, and he instinctively cringed about abusing the data of the users to build out an advertising ecosystem that had a creepy level of surveillance of their users (a notable departure from the whoredom of the Meta philosophy, where they even built shadow profiles for people who weren’t on their platforms just to increase their ability to micro target the advertisement sales to publishers - scary fucking shit). Instead they muddled around the break even mark for a long time like a frog bumping its ass on the ground as it made progress.

But let’s do a comparison with Facebook.

First, Meta is a much larger company. And while Zuck has Saddam Hussein levels of influence and control of the company, and because of how it was incorporated, there is no way for the board to remove Zuck. He is truly the emperor Caesar of Meta. His word is writ large the law of the company.

As of Friday, his fortune was estimated to be $204B dollars. Clearly, he doesn’t have to clip coupons or even ever hit the local bodega to buy some Ragú for the dinner of spaghetti.

Note that that isn’t too far off of where Musk’s fortune was in 2022 when he was coerced into consummating the purchase of Twitter.

If we look at Meta when it closed on Friday, we see that its market cap is $1.57 TRILLION dollars. That means that Meta is about 360X the size of Twitter when Musk bought it.

Mark is rich, but to take Meta private would require about a 20% premium on that $1.57T, or about $1.9T. Nobody is going to loan him enough, and even Musk’s current $467B pot of cash and equity would be able to buy it.

But why would Zuck have to buy and take Meta private?

Advertisers and Brand Safety

One of the things that was already evident when I left Twitter in late winter 2023 was that a lot of the “quality” advertisers were fleeing the platform. The collapse of the safety and trust team, turning off of the services that kept ads from bing shown side by side with the gore, the porn, and the shocking antisemitism that flooded Twitter after Musk took over was already evident.

From reports, the situation hasn’t gotten better, culminating in the Dealbook Summit in the fall of 2023 where Musk basically told advertisers who were boycotting Twitter ad buys because of the shittiness of the platform to “go fuck themselves⁵”.

No, the quality brands are mostly gone (apart from small token-buys), replace by gold hawkers, crypto scams, doomsday preppers, and other low quality advertisers.

Meta can’t take that hit. Their revenue is virtually all made by advertisement sales, and if the quality advertisers begin shunning the platform, the dollars will stop rolling in, and the death spiral will begin.

Meta is too large for Zuck to pull a Musk. But Zuck is trying really hard to endear himself to the MAGA influencers, and Trumpanzies.

This will not end well. And the board really can’t do fuck all about it, as Zuck is the Caesar of Meta.

I hope you have plenty of popcorn to watch the formation of the enshittification crater that this coming episode will leave upon the social media ecosystem.

1. I will FOREVER deadname Twitter. Fuck Elonia Musk sideways with a chainsaw

2. Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow, and it perfectly encapsulates the end state of the current internet

3. Unicorns are supposed to be rare. But it has become the norm of companies remaining private with VC backing until their valuations are above $1B before they even begin to consider talking to the I-bankers about an IPO.

Alas, this really is great for the VC’s and the founders, but it is fucking shitty for the rank and file who work for this hot company, likely have meaningful equity that means fuck-all until the “exit” and many have to leave to get a job that pays enough to survive instead of hoping for the big payout.

4. At least in the US. Other parts of the world do not have the First Amendment and there are laws that must be followed.

Additionally, for a long time, the moderation has been inconsistent, slapdash, and ineffective. I do not believe the rhetoric of the Right on this, as they have had a pretty free reign on Facebook since before Trump I

5. It was truly spectacular to hear him. If you want to see it for yourself, here’s the link to the summit: