Visit SE Asia sometime and you'll experience a very different sentiment. Hundreds of millions of people rely on Meta to provide valuable services every day, some of them borderline essential. This is undebatable.
The outsized public hatred toward Meta is almost entirely driven by a bureaucratic, anti-technology Europe (that has finally realized that their overstepping is hurting their future) and a US political institution that needed someone to demonize to keep us all distracted.
There are very good reasons to dislike Meta and Meta products. But they're likely not the ones you're referring to.
Their business model ties profitability directly to maximal surveillance and psychological manipulation, as the basis for inducing addiction, manufactured demand, and impulse spending. With only theatrical attempts at hiding the lack of inhibitions or safeguards about harnessing material damaging to children, teens, adults and society at large.
That is the economic structure of their business model.
Now juice that model with $ billions of revenue and $ trillions in potential market cap for shareholders, who demand double digit percentage growth per year.
That defines the scale of available resources to drive the business model forward.
This is a machine designed to scale up and maximally leverage seemingly small conflicts of interest into a global monster that feeds on mental and social decay.
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Of course, it benefits Facebook and customers to mix in as much genuine side products and services with real value as possible.
But that only wedges the destructive core into individual lives and society even more.
Now add AI algorithms to their core competencies of surveillance integration and psychological manipulation, and to the side value honey features.
We are getting Stockholm’ed and stewed in a lot of high walled slow cookers these days.
What kind of services? IM app? Thailand uses LINE, Vietnam: Zalo, Cambodia and Myanmar Telegram and Viber, in Indonesia many uses few IM at the same time.
It is not the IM apps, SE region which I suspect the author is referencing predominately uses Whatsapp.
The value in SE is mostly B2C, instead of marketplace feature, most local tiny(or even big ones willing to evade tax by not having any physical presence) businesses will open a small business or general page and publish their wares as posts. Lives will be used to demo products or services now and then. People follow these pages and flock over to buy things.
In a sense, Facebook and Whatsapp are like Amazon/Aliexpress of SE Asia.
I was there for 5 months visiting a friend(and recovering from burnout), and number of people using such pages to sell anything from basic clothing to food to services are HUGE! It is literally a huge business hub for people to discover and make online purchases. In summary, Facebook pages are the e-commerce front(due to lack of shopify/amazon and similar operators who can handle logistics and payments) for individual businesses.
There were many journalist reports about this phenomenon several years back, but I am too sleepy and tired to link those.
Dumb fucks is what the founder of the company has thought about it's users since day 1. They've been caught lying to cover up terrible things they've done so many times it's just assumed at this point. Anyone relying on their services is being taken advantage of first by Meta, and then by their own failed economy that won't provide an alternative. I've never once considered what Europe thinks.
Like, literally building smart homes.
Locally intelligent in ways that enable truly magical smart home experiences while preserving privacy and building trust.
But connected in ways that facilitate pseudo-social interactions, entertainment, and commerce.
Meta's biggest competitors are Apple and Amazon. This is the first clear opportunity they've had to leapfrog both.