Meta's Monopoly Made It a Fair-Weather Friend

This week, Mark Zuckerberg took the basal successful an antitrust trial that could effect successful the breakup of Meta’s societal networking empire. It mightiness beryllium years earlier the astir 3 cardinal users of the company’s flagship app Facebook—known internally arsenic the Blue app—learn the destiny of the work they inactive use, contempt the changeless obituaries. (For the record, 2 years ago, Tom Alison, who heads the service, issued a statement affirming “Facebook is not dormant nor dying.”) But with each the hubbub surrounding the trial, Facebook users mightiness person missed the astir important quality astir Blue successful years. On March 27, 2025, the 21-year-old institution softly announced a caller feature connected its mobile app: an enactment that would springiness users the caller acquisition of seeing their friends’ contented connected Facebook. Finally, determination was an alternate to a quality provender overwhelmed with garbage, gossip, and influencer videos that radical don’t needfully inquire for but can’t defy clicking connected and past feeling atrocious about. By locating and selecting the Friends tab, your provender volition populate exclusively with posts from radical you cognize successful existent beingness and that you person chosen to link with. You mightiness adjacent telephone it a societal app. Imagine!

The company’s mentation is telling. “Over the years, Facebook evolved to conscionable changing needs...” work the property release, “but the magic of friends has fallen away.” I marvel astatine the passive voice. Meta's valuation is implicit a trillion. It has connected astir fractional of humanity—all due to the fact that of the powerfulness of radical wanting to support up with friends and family. And somehow, the company’s halfway intent of connecting friends conscionable … fell away? Did the thousands of engineers, designers, marketers, and managers moving connected Facebook conscionable aftermath 1 time and say, “Hey, has anyone seen the worldly that’s the precise crushed we are a company?”

No, this didn’t conscionable happen. Consider that, successful that 2023 property merchandise astir Facebook not being dead, Alison listed the priorities for the app that year, including “artificial intelligence, messaging, creators and monetization.” Not a connection astir boosting person content, adjacent though Meta executives knew that radical wanted to spot conscionable that. It came retired successful tribunal that for years Zuckerberg has been alert that his users crave proceeding much from their friends. A Meta survey successful 2020 recovered that 61 percent of users wanted much person posts, and 66 percent wanted to spot a wider diverseness of posts among their friends. A twelvemonth later, different survey reported that 3 retired of the apical 4 “pain points” connected Facebook were owed to what the Federal Trade Commission called “reduced concern successful friends and household sharing.”

Here’s 1 mentation for this. Content from influencers, governmental activists, and faux quality organizations is much profitable and keeps radical connected the work longer. Misinformation from a alien is worthy much to Meta than household updates and question photos from friends. Those don’t usually spell viral. That’s why, erstwhile Alison wrote astir AI, helium didn’t mean utilizing it to find what your friends are saying but to link you with creators who are posting to boost their ain wallets, with the assistance of Facebook monetization. On the stand, Zuckerberg offered a antithetic explanation for the change: People began sharing connected messaging apps alternatively of societal platforms. But could it beryllium that the crushed that they stopped sharing connected Facebook was that each those toxic posts from strangers made the level unpleasant?

Zuckerberg was slippery erstwhile it came to admitting that helium bought Instagram and WhatsApp to destruct competition—a cardinal contented successful the trial. But helium was frank successful acknowledging that the ngo of the institution has veered dramatically from the archetypal feel-good crusade to link humans. It’s present arsenic overmuch an amusement institution arsenic a societal network, helium says. A illustration shared by Meta showed that amusement had overwhelmed societal content. In 2025, Facebook users spent lone 17 percent of their clip looking astatine contented shared from friends. That’s not due to the fact that they similar to work worldly from influencers and anger-boosters—remember, Meta’s ain surveys amusement that users are dying to spot worldly from radical they know. Yet Zuckerberg matter-of-factly noted that erstwhile it comes to person content, “That portion of what we bash hasn’t truly grown.” Again, the passive voice!

Given the hunger radical person to spot person posts, 1 mightiness expect that the skills of Meta’s talented workforce would beryllium employed to maximize the worth of quality connections. For galore years, it was. In the aboriginal 2010s, I was often called to Mark Zuckerberg’s league room, dubbed the Aquarium, to spot immoderate absorbing task meant to summation the worth of the societal network. Some of those projects didn’t enactment out—remember graph search?—but they were honorable attempts astatine fulfilling the institution mission. As the decennary progressed, the societal facet of Facebook became little of a precedence for Zuckerberg, and his passionateness shifted to virtual world and artificial intelligence.