That's nearly 2/3 of people on the planet with Internet connections, according to estimates by the ITU (approx 3B internet users by the end of 2016) [0]. Even if I believed that user figure, which I dont, there is no way Facebook can grow at the same rate for much longer.
[0] http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFa...
I've done some pretty substantial traveling throughout Asia, and just about everyone with a smartphone that I've met also has a Facebook account (excluding China).
In Myanmar (aka Burma) the strict military government restricted internet usage until they turned over control of the government last year. Most people are (within the last 12-24 months) using the internet for the first time! Most have never used a computer, and they only know the internet from an (Android) smartphone. However, every single person who I talked to there who had a smartphone had a Facebook.
The one local I talked to most in depth about this had never used Google! He said he didn't know how to use Google, and he didn't think he needed it. I explained what Google can help with: searching for information, reading news, etc. He showed me that he read news and did searches for things all from within the Facebook app.
I saw similar usage of Facebook in other developing Asian countries (Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia), where people used Facebook as a kind of substitute for a web browser / search engine.
You and I would never think to use Facebook as our internet portal, but it seems to be a very sticky and powerful tool for many of those just coming online.
This is the most frightening thing I've read in a while.
Now, I am not saying google is the perfect answer, but I consider it a hell of a lot better than facebook.
Maybe that's what it is. "Quality content" and "Facebook" in the same sentence sounds absurd.
Google also linking to the web after ads or their own stuff is a benefit over FB of course. But I don't see that being Google's focus.
The cesspool of fake news, Trump gossip, etc, turning into hot topics amongst Myanmar's budding online culture is sad, like a virus spreading.
Another worrisome side effect is the quick adoption of the medium by hate groups inciting violence towards religious minorities with outright lies compounded by the fact that most Myanmar users don't yet know fact checking is possible thanks to the walled garden.
Some users have landed in jail for not realizing posts containing jests about government officials were viewable by said authorities. The country's speech laws are still evolving and users struggle to understand brand new ceoncepts like scoping of comments.
Interesting times...
[1]. https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-tru...
In my opinion, opportunity is better than equality.
FB does not categorically improve the quality of life for its users. FB provides connectivity to others... this is good. But if the cost is making you think the world is askew from what it really is because all you see is what FB's feed shows you... well that's a steep price that nobody, even the poor, should be asked to pay.
It really does have that many users. Even if a solid 20% of them are all fake accounts (which I don't think the percentage is that high), it's still a large part of the connected world.
There's a reason Facebook is developing technology to bring the rest of the unconnected world online. It's because they know they'll reach a point where they'll have the whole connected market, and the only way forward is to grow the market to it's full potential.
Don't let your hatred of the product or company blind your understanding of its scale and influence on the world (both positive and negative).
The Yellow pages had a similar story not too long ago...
I'll give you one data point. When I was in college, we had a Facebook group for every single class and they were extremely valuable. We also used Facebook events heavily for various on-campus events. This too was extremely valuable. Now that I'm out of college, I have less affinity with those products from Facebook but I gravitate towards different parts of the site now.
Either way, you can say that your life would not materially change for the better or worse if Facebook fell off the face of the internet tomorrow. That's a valid opinion to hold. But don't make the folly of generalizing a global product that is so incredibly pervasive in ways that we can't fully understand. I'm not saying that this reality is a good thing, nor am I saying it's a bad thing. However we can have better conversations about the effect Facebook has than "Facebook is useless", "Zuck is a spy", "I deleted my account, fuck FB", "All their metrics are fake", "Something something Myspace".
Those simply aren't interesting statements anymore. They just aren't. They're tired and have been repeated year after year for more than a decade.
In fact this is how I think of them and their business interests; they are nothing more than merchants of human attention (like Google). After all, the bulk of their revenues comes directly from ads.
VR may be toy-like tech for a lot of people today, but Zuckerberg is betting on it to be the next big frontier for computing similar to how they doubled-down on mobile with the emergence of touch screens heralded by the iPhone.
How much social media activity/growth is not human?
As much as I agree with you, that kind of activity especially by first party or those related is called market manipulation. SEC and investors won't take lightly to it.
On a related note, the market itself is controlled by HFT bots. Don't rock the boat too much and no one is the wiser.
Edit: Would love to some actual debate on this rather than downvotes with no context. I have deployed many bots for fun to twitter and reddit. I could easily do the same on Instagram, Snap or Facebook. I could even make them look "Kinda real" with markov chain driven text input. Super, duper easy.
Your blithe comment has some merit on its surface -- I also "think" it seems trivial to do account fraud at a large scale -- but it pattern matches against the "I can build Stack Overflow in a weekend" mode. I can only guess, but I imagine the difficulty factor going from 500 to 1 million bots is much greater than 200x higher. (As in, if there are 1,000,000 people right now on Earth who could do the former, I suspect there are way fewer than 1mm/500 for the latter.)
There are undoubtedly bot networks that operate (although we have no idea for how long), at a scale that would likely surprise me. However, even that doesn't make the data useless (especially when frequently cited against a previous measurement).
Finally, your non-sequitur about markets being controlled by HFT bots hit a number of negative heuristics in my brain.
I'm disappointed by anemic growth: Facebook has 18 percent increase year over year. They have ~2B users [1]
This q Snapchat had growth of ~5% which will be about ~20% per year. But they are 10x smaller than Facebook.
[1] Facebook 5/3/17 earning report