Mark Zuckerberg owns the majority of voting shares. It's his company, over which he specifically wanted to retain control. Therefore, calling on the board to reign him in is... Misplaced.
If you think the actions of Meta are wrong and should be prevented, you need to act on the regulatory level, not appeal to the very shareholders who profit off the behaviour.
Rather than investigate all the things where investigative journalism could potentially make a difference to real human beings' lives, the Guardian has chosen to pursue a plea for the majority owner of Meta's voting shares (61%) to step down from his position of power. Let us politely ask Sisyphus to stop pushing the boulder instead.
There's no reason to think this (silly) opinion piece is sapping the work of their investigative staff. In an attention economy it might even be drawing eyeballs to it.
The idea of that data ending up in new undetermined hands may-or-may-not be a worse thing, but it reminds me of this bit from Making Money, by Terry Pratchett:
> 'Vetinari, are we to believe that you knowingly put the most important bank in the city into the charge of a known bank robber?'
> [...] 'Should he have left it in the hands of unknown bank robbers?'
> through every scandal, Zuckerberg’s net worth has climbed to nearly $200bn, according to Forbes. Fines mean nothing to those with wealth like his, so the first step to safeguard society is to give Meta a fresh start without Zuckerberg’s influence on future products.
It’s The Guardian - they just propose left-wing hyperbolic noise with no connection to the real world rather than offer any kind of solutions. Not even aware that Zuck is the biggest shareholder and has all the voting rights, it’s his baby and he owns it, he doesn’t have to resign to make the world a better place in The Guardian’s favour.
Read the last paragraph it calls on the shareholders to push back on Mark Zuckerberg. He owns most of the voting rights so its effectively calling on him to push back on himself.
I’m not sure the next CEO would do any better. The social media craze is built for addiction and that’s their business model. Investors won’t be on board, sadly.
Has there ever be a social media plattform that cheered you on for Self-Improvement? DuoLingo comes to mind or some DIY project- like building a piece of furniture?
Just not rewarding flexing, but creating and world improving?
People love to hate Duolingo, but I actually learned things on it getting real results. And it showed me that language learning does not have to be massive suck.
All in all, it is actually one app that is beneficial or at least harmless.
When did you use it? It was a more authentic language-learning tool in the beginning, but was then gradually enshittified in order to maximize engagement on the platform, not actual language mastery. A lot of the most competent language-consultant staff were let go, too.
Today on the shadow libraries, you have your pick of a number of self-teaching textbooks for free, allowing you to find an approach that fits your learning style. No need to rely on a dodgy corporate app.
I very much doubt that they listen to countries in tier 1 and 2 also. If not for the fear of US's relatively stronger regulations, don't think Meta would even pay attention to any complaints in US either.
This would not change with the change in leadership in Meta simply because 18Bn is fairly affordable for Meta's scale, but they should be worried about setting the legal precedent (though they denied any wrong doing).
Other countries may not have the same ability to impose penalties owing to their weaker laws also.
At what price, tho? He harms children, he hijacked the attention of billions and helped the rise of facism and hate, which if not addressed will lead into very dark times again, all for a measly 3% out perform?
Interesting how the author compares the situation to smoking. Were any of the execs of the tobacco companies asked to step down because smoking was found to be harmful to health? My guess is they simply continued and adapted based on how they could remain a profitable company with continued shareholder satisfaction.
I wonder what's the net value Meta offers for the world today. I had a similar thought about Elon the other day, for all his billions, only several million people use Tesla or Starlink, and SpaceX is cool I guess, but value and wealth don't seem to be strongly coupled. How many Tesla investors have managed to cash out and how many of Facebook's advertisers managed to turn a profit?
> How many Tesla's investors have managed to cash out and how many of Facebook's advertisers managed to turn a profit?
It me. That said, I didn't buy TSLA because I was expecting to cash out a few years later when he started acting like a threat to democracy and his own judicial system; when I bought it I thought they had a good business model and I thought they were undervalued.
Now they're overvalued, have lots of visible competitors eating their lunch.
Worse, even if they succeed, given Musk has yet to pay out dividends on that stock and also enough control over the board to give him as many shares as he wants, I think even success would render the stock monopoly money.
Musk probably made more dollar millionaires than anyone in history. Facebook advertisers use it because it works and reaches a hell of a lot of people.
Meta could drop a new feature tomorrow and have the tech media in a shambles within 15 minutes. Their product family is used by 3.6 billion people every day. OAI and Anthropic are still measuring per month.
If you think Meta is bad now, just wait until Zuck is replaced by a soulless, profit-obsessed corporate CEO whose primary job is maximizing shareholder profit. Meta as a company can get far worse.
People should really be careful what they wish for.
Honestly, the world has grown past the need for Meta. I would not cry if it completely shut down, problem is, what will fill the void? It would be nice to have something not controlled by Big American Corporation (or Chinese, or any, for that matter), but somehow I don't see it happening.
Okay but like, you can make that happen. You can just stop using it.
Interestingly I did learn of a niche which is completely unserved except by Meta recently: child-locked messaging apps.
Messenger for Kids basically does everything you want it to - restricted functionality, restricted contact lists etc. I won't use it, but I only found out about it because I was hoping someone had built a Signal client which did exactly that.
I always find it surprising when I hear of someone younger using facebook. I associate it with retired/elderly folks who love posting cryptic messages about their health or how their day has gone wanting attention.
Most people under 40, 30 and even 20 I know are on Instagram, and many under 40 and 30 are on Facebook. Maybe it varies with country, education level or some other factors.
Central Europe here myself (Switzerland to be precise) signal and telegram are the dominant IM and Instagram is just as dead as Facebook, sure some might use it but nobody expects anyone else to to.
When I open Instagram that is still connected to all my old friends, class mates, travel buddies and whatever I get 90% third party ads and 10% posts that might even be a few months old, and most of that is just "look at me" type of content.
Doubtful that it's illegal, they have lawyers. Hard to say it's unethical either given that there is a clear option to pay instead of be tracked (which is in any case trivially defeated by an ad-blocker). For centuries until yesterday people paid for journalism like they paid for any other service.
Eh dunno. My impression is that from the PoV of his notional bosses - Meta shareholders - he’s doing everything ”right”. Revenue up, addiction/recurring revenue stable, keeping fines low.
I’d be happy to see Meta gone altogether, but unless I missed the memo, Meta isn’t particularly upset about what it’s been up to (beyond bland press releases).
> But if Meta is truly interested in prioritizing the safety of users
Why would it be interested in that? It's interested in increasing shareholder profits.
> It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta
What, like in the leadership of a political party? Meta does not work for the public good; if anything, it's rather the opposite. And it's not like another one of their people would change course and work and make it a public benefit company.
If "competitive capitalism" is how you want to frame it, then Zuckerberg should have been thrown out for essentially burning $83 billion dollars on a VR world that is never, ever going to pan out. That's going into a hole at over $400k per user. It's a disaster and any CEO of any functional company would be out on their ass, but Meta and Facebook are quite dysfunctional.
Sometimes, the Guardian publishes articles like this that just serve no purpose.
Zuckerberg is never resigning from Meta. Investors don't want him to resign from Meta.
What it is time for, though, is to ask ourselves as a society if the ad-fueled privacy-infringing depression-triggering attention-grabbing social media feeds are worth it.
People used to smoke. Now they dont. Change is possible.
> But if Meta is truly interested in prioritizing the safety of users, the board should request the resignation of Mark Zuckerberg and restructure to put safety above profit.
It is singularly idiotic that people think people, companies, boards, governments, or anyone else should be "good", and that society will progress by rooting out "evil" ones, as adjudicated by their own standards.
People and by extension companies of people and by extension corporations, NGOs, governments, and everything else in society behaves according to incentives. "Safety of users" or "approval of The Guardian employees" does not rank particularly highly in the incentive scale next to money for anybody, least of all Facebook shareholders, lol.
The factors that influence behaviors are pretty simple. Money, negative money, threat of judicial or ultrajudicial retribution, etc. The people as a whole have levers to pull in order to shape society as they would like. Wishing for good and praying for evil to be dispelled are not among them, that's just like any other superstition.
Mark Zuckerberg owns the majority of voting shares. It's his company, over which he specifically wanted to retain control. Therefore, calling on the board to reign him in is... Misplaced.
If you think the actions of Meta are wrong and should be prevented, you need to act on the regulatory level, not appeal to the very shareholders who profit off the behaviour.
I liked how the article was aimed at Mark personally.
Not everyone gets super voting shares, but everyone gets a life and has to live on the same planet.
Rather than investigate all the things where investigative journalism could potentially make a difference to real human beings' lives, the Guardian has chosen to pursue a plea for the majority owner of Meta's voting shares (61%) to step down from his position of power. Let us politely ask Sisyphus to stop pushing the boulder instead.
There's no reason to think this (silly) opinion piece is sapping the work of their investigative staff. In an attention economy it might even be drawing eyeballs to it.
Meta should just close. It's like wanting to change CEO for the dioxin factory.
Maybe they should rebrand again. It took a few renames to get the stink off of Blackwater (private military contractor).
Closing sale! 50%+ Off Sale on data for the majority of humans on Earth!
The idea of that data ending up in new undetermined hands may-or-may-not be a worse thing, but it reminds me of this bit from Making Money, by Terry Pratchett:
> 'Vetinari, are we to believe that you knowingly put the most important bank in the city into the charge of a known bank robber?'
> [...] 'Should he have left it in the hands of unknown bank robbers?'
> through every scandal, Zuckerberg’s net worth has climbed to nearly $200bn, according to Forbes. Fines mean nothing to those with wealth like his, so the first step to safeguard society is to give Meta a fresh start without Zuckerberg’s influence on future products.
What is the author's model of a company?
It’s The Guardian - they just propose left-wing hyperbolic noise with no connection to the real world rather than offer any kind of solutions. Not even aware that Zuck is the biggest shareholder and has all the voting rights, it’s his baby and he owns it, he doesn’t have to resign to make the world a better place in The Guardian’s favour.
It’s an opinion piece
Read the last paragraph it calls on the shareholders to push back on Mark Zuckerberg. He owns most of the voting rights so its effectively calling on him to push back on himself.
It's an article written by a guest contributor - not an editorial written as the voice of the newspaper
I’m not sure the next CEO would do any better. The social media craze is built for addiction and that’s their business model. Investors won’t be on board, sadly.
Has there ever be a social media plattform that cheered you on for Self-Improvement? DuoLingo comes to mind or some DIY project- like building a piece of furniture?
Just not rewarding flexing, but creating and world improving?
Duolingo has nothing to do with self improvement, it's just a shiny presentation for highly addictive game.
We should reward quality of engagement, not just length of it.
People love to hate Duolingo, but I actually learned things on it getting real results. And it showed me that language learning does not have to be massive suck.
All in all, it is actually one app that is beneficial or at least harmless.
When did you use it? It was a more authentic language-learning tool in the beginning, but was then gradually enshittified in order to maximize engagement on the platform, not actual language mastery. A lot of the most competent language-consultant staff were let go, too.
Today on the shadow libraries, you have your pick of a number of self-teaching textbooks for free, allowing you to find an approach that fits your learning style. No need to rely on a dodgy corporate app.
"Quality of engagement" is as hard to measure as "length of engagement" is easy.
Duolingo has joined to the addiction club
I think everyone is infected by doomerism.
Why care about the long term consequences if the world is going to be over in the next 20 years.
At the billionaire level that seems to be the case.
Actually, they all seem solely interested in the future. The bunkers are a drop in the bucket for them, so why not?
Facebook doesn't even listen to countries beyond tier 2 as per their own disclosures - https://www.theverge.com/22743753/facebook-tier-list-countri...
I very much doubt that they listen to countries in tier 1 and 2 also. If not for the fear of US's relatively stronger regulations, don't think Meta would even pay attention to any complaints in US either.
This would not change with the change in leadership in Meta simply because 18Bn is fairly affordable for Meta's scale, but they should be worried about setting the legal precedent (though they denied any wrong doing).
Other countries may not have the same ability to impose penalties owing to their weaker laws also.
> Last week, Meta[...] agreed to a settlement of up to $18bn [...].
>
> But if Meta is truly interested in prioritizing the safety of users [...]
Where did that "but" clause come from? Has that ever been a priority?
For comparison:
He outperformed the Nasdaq 100 which made 18% (plus dividends) in the same time.
And he way outperformed Warren Buffet who made 14% in the same time.
At what price, tho? He harms children, he hijacked the attention of billions and helped the rise of facism and hate, which if not addressed will lead into very dark times again, all for a measly 3% out perform?
Mark Zuckerberg is the PT Barnum of tech and Meta is his predatory circus. Meta doesn't make much sense without him.
Interesting how the author compares the situation to smoking. Were any of the execs of the tobacco companies asked to step down because smoking was found to be harmful to health? My guess is they simply continued and adapted based on how they could remain a profitable company with continued shareholder satisfaction.
I wonder what's the net value Meta offers for the world today. I had a similar thought about Elon the other day, for all his billions, only several million people use Tesla or Starlink, and SpaceX is cool I guess, but value and wealth don't seem to be strongly coupled. How many Tesla investors have managed to cash out and how many of Facebook's advertisers managed to turn a profit?
Aye.
> How many Tesla's investors have managed to cash out and how many of Facebook's advertisers managed to turn a profit?
It me. That said, I didn't buy TSLA because I was expecting to cash out a few years later when he started acting like a threat to democracy and his own judicial system; when I bought it I thought they had a good business model and I thought they were undervalued.
Now they're overvalued, have lots of visible competitors eating their lunch.
Worse, even if they succeed, given Musk has yet to pay out dividends on that stock and also enough control over the board to give him as many shares as he wants, I think even success would render the stock monopoly money.
We've rediscovered the need for academia from first principles
Musk probably made more dollar millionaires than anyone in history. Facebook advertisers use it because it works and reaches a hell of a lot of people.
Meta could drop a new feature tomorrow and have the tech media in a shambles within 15 minutes. Their product family is used by 3.6 billion people every day. OAI and Anthropic are still measuring per month.
This article is very shortsighted.
If you think Meta is bad now, just wait until Zuck is replaced by a soulless, profit-obsessed corporate CEO whose primary job is maximizing shareholder profit. Meta as a company can get far worse.
People should really be careful what they wish for.
we will look back on it as the big tobacco of our generation
No, that will be the gambling endemic in every aspect of our society.
OxyContin, Enron, WorldCom, Super-size-me, Pets.com, Asbestos in the ceiling tiles...
It was always burning since the world's been turning
WELL THEN, if Joan Donovan thinks so.
Honestly, the world has grown past the need for Meta. I would not cry if it completely shut down, problem is, what will fill the void? It would be nice to have something not controlled by Big American Corporation (or Chinese, or any, for that matter), but somehow I don't see it happening.
Okay but like, you can make that happen. You can just stop using it.
Interestingly I did learn of a niche which is completely unserved except by Meta recently: child-locked messaging apps.
Messenger for Kids basically does everything you want it to - restricted functionality, restricted contact lists etc. I won't use it, but I only found out about it because I was hoping someone had built a Signal client which did exactly that.
What void tho? The majority of people _I know_ below 40 don't use Facebook or any related service at all.
Do they use Instagram or WhatsApp?
> or any related services.
So nah, most don't. I know some do, but the main socialisation isn't happening there.
I always find it surprising when I hear of someone younger using facebook. I associate it with retired/elderly folks who love posting cryptic messages about their health or how their day has gone wanting attention.
Most people under 40, 30 and even 20 I know are on Instagram, and many under 40 and 30 are on Facebook. Maybe it varies with country, education level or some other factors.
I think you're forgetting that Meta owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
I am not forgetting that no. Signal and Telegram are the main drivers and Instagram is just as dead as Facebook itself is.
It's different by location. E. g. in Europe many people uses Facebook, many under 40s too.
In the US: 25–34 years: Around 25.7% to 25.9% (the largest single demographic group).
Central Europe here myself (Switzerland to be precise) signal and telegram are the dominant IM and Instagram is just as dead as Facebook, sure some might use it but nobody expects anyone else to to.
The people you know aren't exactly representative of the whole country. Most people I know are on instagram.
When I open Instagram that is still connected to all my old friends, class mates, travel buddies and whatever I get 90% third party ads and 10% posts that might even be a few months old, and most of that is just "look at me" type of content.
So I have to assume it's dead
It's still used for stuff like events or groups
Or European, for that matter. Don't fancy submitting my ID to get access.
So says The Guardian, while showing me an illegal “Reject and Subscribe” tracking banner. Mixed messages.
Doubtful that it's illegal, they have lawyers. Hard to say it's unethical either given that there is a clear option to pay instead of be tracked (which is in any case trivially defeated by an ad-blocker). For centuries until yesterday people paid for journalism like they paid for any other service.
We haven't see any meaningful improvement from Meta for years.
Eh dunno. My impression is that from the PoV of his notional bosses - Meta shareholders - he’s doing everything ”right”. Revenue up, addiction/recurring revenue stable, keeping fines low.
I’d be happy to see Meta gone altogether, but unless I missed the memo, Meta isn’t particularly upset about what it’s been up to (beyond bland press releases).
> But if Meta is truly interested in prioritizing the safety of users
Why would it be interested in that? It's interested in increasing shareholder profits.
> It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta
What, like in the leadership of a political party? Meta does not work for the public good; if anything, it's rather the opposite. And it's not like another one of their people would change course and work and make it a public benefit company.
> put safety above profit.
I think does not reflect the reality of how competitive capitalism works.
If "competitive capitalism" is how you want to frame it, then Zuckerberg should have been thrown out for essentially burning $83 billion dollars on a VR world that is never, ever going to pan out. That's going into a hole at over $400k per user. It's a disaster and any CEO of any functional company would be out on their ass, but Meta and Facebook are quite dysfunctional.
He's not going to
He went out of the way to make his company structure prevent that (also Elon)
Absolutely idiotic take. Why is the Guardian peddling this opinion piece?
Stepping down as CEO would do nothing, so unless you plan on forcing him to sell his share IDK what the point of the article is.
Mark Zuckerberg (13.68% equity; 61.2% voting)[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms
They peddle confusion, not solutions or sense.
Sometimes, the Guardian publishes articles like this that just serve no purpose.
Zuckerberg is never resigning from Meta. Investors don't want him to resign from Meta.
What it is time for, though, is to ask ourselves as a society if the ad-fueled privacy-infringing depression-triggering attention-grabbing social media feeds are worth it.
People used to smoke. Now they dont. Change is possible.
> But if Meta is truly interested in prioritizing the safety of users, the board should request the resignation of Mark Zuckerberg and restructure to put safety above profit.
It is singularly idiotic that people think people, companies, boards, governments, or anyone else should be "good", and that society will progress by rooting out "evil" ones, as adjudicated by their own standards.
People and by extension companies of people and by extension corporations, NGOs, governments, and everything else in society behaves according to incentives. "Safety of users" or "approval of The Guardian employees" does not rank particularly highly in the incentive scale next to money for anybody, least of all Facebook shareholders, lol.
The factors that influence behaviors are pretty simple. Money, negative money, threat of judicial or ultrajudicial retribution, etc. The people as a whole have levers to pull in order to shape society as they would like. Wishing for good and praying for evil to be dispelled are not among them, that's just like any other superstition.
Unfortunately framing everything as incentives is the only non-emotional way to analyse these meta-behaviours (get it?).