19.3. Responses to Meta’s Business Strategies

Let’s look at some responses to Meta’s business plan.

19.3.1. Competition

When Facebook started, there were already other social media platforms in use that Facebook had to compete against, but Facebook became dominant. Since then other companies have tried to compete with Facebook, with different levels of success.

Google+ tried to mimic much of what Facebook did, but it got little use and never took off (not enough people to benefit from the network effect).

Other social media sites have used more unique features to distinguish themselves from Facebook and get a foothold, such as Twitter with its character limit (forcing short messages, so you can see lots of posts in quick succession), Vine and then TikTok based on short videos, etc.

Mastodon [s48] (Fediverse [s49] set of connected social media platforms that it is part of) has a different way of distinguishing itself as a social media network, in that it is an open-source, community-funded social media network (no ads), and hopes people will join to get away from corporate control.

Other social media networks have focused on parts of the world where Facebook was less dominant, and so they got a foothold there first, and then spread, like the social media platforms in China (e.g., Sina Weibo, QQ, and TikTok).

19.3.2. Privacy Concerns

Another source of responses to Meta (and similar social media sites), is concern around privacy (especially in relation to surveillance capitalism).

The European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [s50] law, which forces companies to protect user information in certain ways and give users a “right to be forgotten” [s51] online.

Apple also is concerned about privacy, so it introduced app tracking transparency in 2021 [s52]. In response, Facebook says Apple iOS privacy change will result in $10 billion revenue hit this year [s53]. Note that Apple can afford to be concerned with privacy like this because it does not make much money off of behavioral data. Instead, Apple’s profits [s54] are mostly from hardware (e.g., iPhone) and services (e.g., iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV+).