I'm Boycotting Meta. Here's Why
Why we can't let Meta continue getting away with things.
I’m normally vehemently against the idea of cancel culture.
However, Meta seems to have somehow managed to convince me that they are worthy of cancellation. They just seem to have done everything in the entire encyclopedia of unethical business practices. From finding both illegally innovative and innovatively illegal ways to collect increasingly large amounts of personal data to industrially cracking down on the ability of users to say things that their advertisers don’t like, they’ve done it all.
However, this is not the real problem. The real problem lies in the fact that despite the extent of Meta’s wrongoing being common knowledge, very few consequences have actually been brought against them. For example, the fines they have had to pay equal an inconsequential portion of their total revenue. Additionally, their userbase continues to grow at a phenomenal rate yearly.
This has lead me to think about why Meta hasn’t suffered consequences, as one of the first and hardest hitting consequences a social media platform can face is loss of users. This is especially true for Meta because the primary reason for this is that the only appeal factor of Meta is the size of their userbase. Almost everyone has family members using Facebook or Instagram, but not everyone has family members using X or Reddit even though the content on these platforms is of similar or better quality than can be found on Meta’s platforms.
This is the root of the problem: we as internet users haven’t stepped up where we should have, and haven’t brought down long-term consequences on the platforms that we know are doing more systemic wrong than many of the individuals cancelled in the last five or so years.
This is why Meta, even though I never thought I’d say this, needs to finally be cancelled.
If everyone stops using their sites, the exclusive appeal of Meta is gone entirely and the primary performance indicator of social media platforms falls back to content quality. In this market, Meta will quickly lose due to the distinct lack of anything actually genuine on their platform (see Facebook’s current AI problem for more context). This is in great contrast to other platforms like Reddit which is largely authentic and X which is making progress towards being largely authentic.
This is shown even further by the fact that Meta allows outright allows unlabeled AI generated models to promote their AI generated OnlyFans on the platform, which is a level beyond anything we’ve really seen any other platform explicitly allowing. (It does happen on other platforms, but those platforms try to fight back against it, instead of allowing it to go viral.)
We need to leave Meta, now more than ever, because the longer that continue to give them merely symbolic punishments for their actions, the longer that we demonstrate that they are safe to keep pushing the boundaries of what we will allow.
I think Meta can be compared to a misbehaving child. If we as the parents choose to establish a clear boundary of what is and isn’t ok, they will behave themselves. However, if we fail to do this, they will push the boundary of what they can get away with as they have done in cases such as their use of a VPN app to decrypt HTTPS traffic of users and send it to their servers for analysis of usage of their competitors’ apps.
It’s time for us to change our parenting style, and it starts with each one of us.
I’m boycotting Meta. Are you?
George Baskerville, 7th of May 2024
P.S. All of my articles licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal. Download them on the GitHub repo