Wow, that’s the best take on this entire thing I’ve read. I’ve been saying much of this for months and I’m also not an active Facebook user.

The market’s had a hard time deciding what to make of all the “scandals” but the past few headlines have had less and less of an effect on the stock. The TC article that came out yesterday had absolutely zero effect which surprised me a little and the news that they might receive a record fine a week or two ago knocked the stock down for literally twelve minutes before it sprang back up (I was following it that day). I think the market is finally ready to move past all of this and focus on what moves Facebook is going to make going forward because it’s quite obvious users and advertisers don’t care about any of this.

I think there are two camps out to get Facebook for reasons that go beyond privacy- media outlets threatened by its existence and Twitter users who have amassed a large following and view it as an “us versus them” dynamic because they’ve come to rely on Twitter as a communication mechanism. To view Twitter as any better is completely illogical but media outlets are happy to choose favorites if it suits them.

yeah, twitter users are notorious for how much they love jack and twitter

I’ve been saying it forever. The media hates new forms of advertising because that was their missed opportunity. The media had gotten out of control regardless. They are about as factual and unbiased as a state run news organization at this point.

Hopefully it will be possible to have reasonable discourse on HN again instead of the constant flaming.

There's proof of the media conglomerates not liking Facebook and doing everything in their power to stop them and similar companies, one just needs to look at the whole situation surrounding the EU copyright directive, Art. 11 and 13. The main reason it almost passed and threatened to screw with the state of the internet as we know it is because major German media conglomerates lobbied for it heavily to use it as a weapon against companies like Facebook and Google. The whole directive being inspired by a similar legal solution that's been tried in the past by Spain, under similar consequences by similar actors towards the same targets -- it failed spectacularly. Regardless, media conglomerates were willing to use money to force a legal win against online entities they fear are in control of some of their revenue and future.

I have to admit some confusion here.

Is it that the media companies are going broke because of FB and so they hate them, or is it media companies have vast amounts of capital at their disposal to try and bring them to ruin.

My understanding of media’s situation is quite different, and the downswing started occurring a longer time before FB came around.

First hand I can tell you that they don’t expect to take FB down and return to former glory.

Some are even looking at buyouts to return to more of a startup/reboot phase. Not a conspiracy to stick it to anyone else.

you're being downvoted but i think it's crazy that people ignore the obvious economic incentives that a publicly traded company like the new york times has to wage war against a company that has siphoned their main source of revenue

So, the linked article is simply flaming the media, as far as I can see.

The media has always put dominant companies under substantial scrutiny, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Equifax have all had their fair share of tough stories over the years.

I see nothing particularly unfair in the way that Facebook's travails have been reported. Rather than talking in generalities, perhaps you could give some specific examples of stories that have treated Facebook unfairly.

That’s an interesting perspective.

It occurs to me that the mainstream American media suddenly turned very negative towards Facebook ever since they've got the idea that Facebook was probably one important reason that Trump got elected. While I agree Facebook has some real problems and they need to do better, but the recent reports appears almost nitpicking to me