Did Mark Zuckerberg start Facebook on a similar path? That’s the big question investors should start asking as Meta Platforms Inc. META, +6.55% CEO is trying to change his strategy amid clear signs of discomfort. After its first decline in users three months ago, Facebook reported its first quarterly revenue decline in history on Wednesday, and Zuckerberg’s response is to emulate a rival and send the company into dangerous waters that already nearly killed the platform and they took the US democracy with it. Zuckerberg is changing the company’s core apps to rely much more on artificial intelligence to drive the content its users see, seeking to emulate growing Chinese rival TikTok – a major change to give the algorithm more power over what what people see on Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg told analysts on the company’s second-quarter earnings call that Meta’s apps will rely more on the discovery engine, rather than people or things you follow, for content. This means that users will (and already do) see content from complete strangers in their feeds and videos, just like TikTok. “Right now, about 15% of the content in a person’s Facebook feed, and slightly more than that in their Instagram feed, is recommended by our AI from people, groups or accounts you don’t follow,” Zuckerberg said. “And we expect those numbers to more than double by the end of next year.” Facebook has been lucky to survive a series of scandals in recent years, from misinformation about embarrassing elections to selling personal user data and helping spread the incitement to violence that led to the storming of the US Capitol. However, apparently nothing was learned, as the company, or at least its algorithm, will now decide what foreign content you see. Facebook and the world have already learned that bad actors will learn how to game this algorithm, leading to a predominance of inflammatory posts or videos, divisive content that will pit strangers against strangers on an even more terrifying scale than already exists today. If we’re lucky, the result will be that the users Facebook still has will decide it’s time to leave for other online destinations, just as Yahoo fans once did. While the algorithm takes on even more of the burden of Facebook and Instagram — the content moderation aspect of both social networking sites is already mostly handled by artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg said in response to a question on the call, showing just how inept the Facebook’s technology to succeed in its goals — Zuckerberg will devote his human resources to his dream of the “metaverse.” Zuckerberg’s grand vision is to create a digital universe inhabited by those who want to escape the real world of grass, flowers, air, sky, animals and people by wearing a bulky headset so you can hang out with your friends in a digital nightclub or conference room or wherever you want. Virtual reality has only proven popular with a small segment of the population and is still too uncomfortable for mainstream consumer adoption, something Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang has already learned. Instead, all those Facebook parents and grandparents Zuckerberg no longer cares about will be taken care of by bots while his minions focus on a new world: The uncomfortable, potentially dystopian future. Facebook and Instagram had massive growth because they appealed to the masses, not just power users or the techies who develop these products. If Meta loses those users, its apps will continue their current downward spiral — digital ad declines, recession or no — the same way Yahoo failed to move to mobile, with a complex site and services that couldn’t easily to adapt tried to copy younger rivals, just like Facebook is doing now. Zuckerberg is the king of Meta, with absolute control over the founders, so what he says is the law of the land — power that Yang and the parade of CEOs who took over Yahoo when he wasn’t in charge never had. No one is going to stop Zuckerberg from making this bet on an algorithm-driven future, so investors must decide if they want to take the chance that there is nothing ahead of him but a downward spiral to the same fate he has already seen. Silicon Valley from a once popular web portal.
