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What is the true function of a social network? Is it a platform that connects people online, a virtual meeting space where we can consume content posted by our acquaintances? That is how it was perceived in its heyday, in the early 2000s. Facebook was the place to find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone was throwing a party without inviting you. However, over the past decade, social networks have become more and more like traditional media. This is where we encounter celebrity endorsements, experts who voice opinions on current news, aggregated pop culture clips, an increasing flow of AI-generated content, and other material aimed at attracting as many viewers as possible. The people we follow and their posts are becoming more like needles in a digital haystack. Social networks have lost their sociality.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made this point during more than ten hours of testimony over three days last week as part of the initial phase of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigation into Facebook’s parent company, Meta. Zuckerberg said the company had recently been engaged in “a general concept of entertainment and making sense of the world and discovering what’s going on.” This underappreciated shift away from interpersonal interaction has been measured by the company itself. During its opening statement, Meta showed a chart illustrating that “the share of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’” has declined over the past two years from twenty-two percent to seventeen percent on Facebook, and from eleven percent to seven percent on Instagram.
The FTC alleges that Meta held an illegal monopoly in the “personal social networking” space, in part through its acquisitions of Facebook competitors like Instagram, which it bought in 2012, and the messaging app WhatsApp, which it acquired in 2014. But the FTC’s definition of the social media industry remains vague, and the antitrust lawsuit was already dismissed once, in 2021, in part because of the uncertainty of the “personal social networking” market. Meta’s counterargument, in a sense, is that social media, as such, no longer exists in the format it did in the early 2000s, and what the company’s platforms are now known for — digital consumption of a variety of content — has become so pervasive that no single company or platform can claim to have a monopoly on it. In one slide at trial, Meta showed an image of a boxing ring with the logos of Instagram, Facebook, and various companies that Meta argues are competitors, including TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s iMessage, though the FTC has not identified any of those platforms as competitors. The company also used smartphone screenshots from different apps to show how they converge on common formats: Short videos look the same on both Instagram and TikTok; messages look nearly identical in Instagram DMs and in Apple’s iMessage. While such similarities serve as useful evidence for Meta’s defense, they also highlight how mind-numbing the entire online ecosystem has become. Whereas Facebook might have seemed unique and indispensable in 2012, it now feels like part of a crowded marketplace of apps competing for the same audience.
The FTC’s case, which began during Donald Trump’s first term, involves reexamining business deals approved more than a decade ago, when the industry looked very different. That makes the commission’s allegations less than foolproof. Benedict Evans, an influential tech analyst, has called the FTC’s definition of social media “gerrymandering.” He told me: “Under the FTC’s definition, TikTok is not a competitor to Facebook at all. Does that mean Facebook can safely acquire TikTok?” Antitrust lawyers must prove that alleged monopolistic practices harm consumers. In another antitrust case against Google, a court found that the company had maintained a monopoly on certain parts of the online advertising market by integrating its various automated advertising technologies, unfairly favoring itself and harming its publisher clients by “diminishing their revenues.” However, in the case of Meta, there is no difference in prices – all Meta platforms provide users with free access, so the question of harm becomes less clear.
Instead, the FTC argues that Meta’s alleged monopoly has led to a lack of innovation and fewer choices for consumers. But that’s also hard to prove in the case of the WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions, since both deals happened early in the companies’ lives. When WhatsApp was acquired in 2014, it had about half a billion users; it now has more than two billion. As Evans noted, the FTC argues that “if Meta had not acquired WhatsApp, it would have become a serious competitor.” He added: “What we do know, looking back at history, is that WhatsApp’s founders had no intention of doing any of the things Meta did to facilitate its meteoric growth.” One of WhatsApp’s founders once compared the service’s goals to those of Craigslist, Zuckerberg recalled during his testimony. Meta, by contrast, aggressively pursued growth by loading WhatsApp with features like social groups and video calling. The FTC notes that market competition can lead to “better features, functionality, and more.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
