Additionally, the privacy review process for new products/features is extremely stringent and time consuming. Product teams have been hamstrung significantly, with some engineers I know complaining that they're not even able to get half as much work done as they used to.
I think focusing on a rogue employee as the threat it missing the mark. The real threat is the ability for huge corporations to legitimize institutional access to data ("business reasons"), and to fight the legal fight if they are caught doing something wrong. Moral hazards of this mode of failure arguably has much more cumulative societal damage (e.g. Cambridge Analytica).
In other words, I worry less about an evil employee reading my messages than a scaled up corporate machinery milking all my data for dollars that feeds the machine back and also can fight any fight at the courts, DC and the public eye.
And not also sued and reported for criminal prosecution?
Because if someone didn't particular want a job at facebook, but interviewed for the experience and got the job or had been working there and wasn't happy there and was ready to quit-- the threat of instant termination alone may not be that much of a deterrent.
Facebook has nothing approaching a monopoly on attention, social media, messaging, anything really. All of their products have serious, billion-dollar, hundreds-of-millions-of-users competitors. Even if they disappeared in a puff of smoke I don't think any competitive landscapes would change much.
People want a social network that everyone else is on, that works on all their devices, and isn't full of spam bots or bugs. It takes a big company to do this at scale and the network effect makes useful social networks scarce.
Counterexample: email
Do they, though?
...not that you'd miss much, as they're usually spartan, but it's worth mentioning.
It's kind of annoying, because an actual webpage is much better IMO, but it is what it is.
By which I mean that Facebook does not make $trn by supplying likes shares messages and posts.
Google search and on-site ads can be annoying and of questionable relevance, but I rarely see items that are so egregiously ripping off consumers. I dont see this much on twitter promoted tweets either.
What is it about facebook's ad business that encourages such a high proportion of overpriced garbage? Is it the mediums focus on pictures and video that makes these sales work? Is the audience just dumber/less savvy and so these platforms are the only places with enough suckers to do this successfully?
TikTok's sponsored videos seem to be falling into a similar trap to a lesser extent - the markup is less extreme for the few I've looked at out of curiosity.
Do Google and Twitter have some process for quality control to keep the garbage out that Facebook does not? Or is the medium the primary reason for this perceived difference?
The rapid churn when people realize it's harder to make money than it seems means that there is always a new set of people pushing whatever crap is hot that week.
We would also not lack for ways of selling whatever advertisers on FB are selling. They would be different without FB. Different parties would or wouldn't benefit... Connecting consumers to businesses is not scarce.
With Bell, standard oil and past monopolies... the goal was to decentralise while keeping oil and telecom viable. We wanted what they made, and didn't want disruptions.
Do we want what FB makes? Is it scarce? I feel like we would have a sufficient supply of likes, shares, messages and posts regardless. There doesn't need to be a $trn company for those to be supplied.
Generally, I think the issues at stake have evolved. Many of the problems with today's monopolies are power related, rather than efficiency related. I think FB is enormously inefficient, but this is kind of besides the point.