Why Social Media Should Just Stop
Social media should be eliminated as an investment category soon. For a while now I’ve been saying that the appropriate businesses who provide message boards, interpersonal messaging, and online networking are those like ISP’s, family fun center operators, or the like. Companies who spend over $1,000,000,000/year on advertising undoubtably have wasted hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars over the last 10-15 years, paying for ads on other people’s websites. Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and their fellow unicorn brethren all lied about their abilities to advertise creatively, and what kinds of results were possible on these few closed-off websites. In the end, they were really phishing scams.
Instead of sexually disgruntled, misogynistic software developers and venture capitalists, social media (aka message boards) should have been moderated by a variety of different types of companies. In different categories. With the ousting of Bob Chapek and return of Bob Iger (who built the company through a variety of M&A deals) it is possible the market is finally listening. Disney has run actual amusement parks in physical reality (not metaverse) where human beings of all ages go to play.
I’m sure there are unfortunate events in Disney parks, but the number of children who are digitally kidnapped and/or sexploited on Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook far exceeds any other place on Earth.
Verizon, Comcast, T-Mobile, and other telecommunications companies are the actual types of businesses which were supposed to be protected by Section 230. Not website publishers or moderators of blogs where anybody can publish. Social media should have been a place where advertisers had the opportunity to get direct market research on their existing customer base, with an opportunity to have conversations with new prospective customers. It’s an online advertising thing, not a social thing.
How It Might Look From The Outside
Imagine if you and your friends lived their lives around a single billboard. Or print magazine. Actually I think a radio station is probably the most accurate, given that the internet is essentially radio communications. You would never sell your soul out for a radio station. So why a website?
Because social media should have grown naturally, but it didn’t. They “growth hacked” users by a number of nefarious methods. The worst of which was phishing, where the company asked for email addresses, and passwords, not to open up an account – but to advertise more effectively off of their website. Something people don’t know much about in the public, is a thing called a “Facebook pixel.”
This has never been raised in Congress, and advertising agencies use this as their secret sauce so they aren’t going to tell their clients. Also, brand-side marketers do the same things, and got in bed just the same way. It’s hard to say who actually doesn’t know how things really work anymore. But apparently people still pretend, or have had the truth kept from them. In true Peter Thiel fashion, these companies have done nothing but lie about the business they’re in. They aren’t in social media. It’s about phishing.
Just Stop Saying It
The term social media should be eradicated from our parlance. It doesn’t describe what happens, the fact is that every company which raised itself on this phrase has failed miserably, and after 20+ years it’s proven to be nothing but re-skinned message boards. Nothing about Facebook for example, is novel.
Social media should not even just fade off into the sunset. It should crash, burn, and be used to hold certain individuals like Elon Musk fully accountable. Maybe one day it will…
