tl;dr: Facebook / Meta has too much unchecked control and influence over peoples’ social connections.
For this reason we will not contribute to the problem by having a presence on any Meta-owned properties. This primarily includes Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram.
NOTE: the following figures are going to inevitably vary depending on source and methodology. While we cannot vouch for the absolute accuracy of any given figure, they are a best-effort based on available information from multiple sources. If you believe any of the statistics to be significantly inaccurate, please let us know.
Why is Meta so bad?
Given that the right to personal privacy is one of our core company values, it should come as no surprise that we are deeply concerned about the unchecked power and influence of Meta. One of the world’s most powerful commercial empires built on the back of harvesting and monetising personal data is all the justification we would need to avoid using Meta products.
But that’s not even close to the worst of it.
Let’s put aside Facebooks’ many other controversies for a moment. The legacy of intellectual property infringement, the violent and extremist content. The election interference. The proliferation of child abuse material. The intentional algorithmic radicalisation of users. The list goes on and on. All of these have their own cases to be made but there’s something which may initially seem a lot more innocent which deserves more attention.
We’re going to look solely at the issue of their dominance in the social media space.
Just how much influence does Meta have?
Consider the top mobile applications of 2023. There are several different ways to measure this. One would be Monthly Active Users (MAU) (source: statista.com, similarweb.com):
- Facebook (3.1 billion MAUs)
- WhatsApp (2.9 billion MAUs)
- Instagram (2 billion MAUs)
- Facebook Messenger (2 billion MAUs)
- TikTok (1.1 billion MAUs)
With an estimated 5.6 billion mobile users globally as of 2024, Facebook / Meta easily dominates the top 4 spots with over 2 billion MAUs each. The dominance of the mobile application market is so significant that the next closest competitor, TikTok, is more than 1 billion MAUs behind the weakest of the four leading Meta apps.
Despite this dominance, their growth in both absolute terms and relative to competition continues at a rapid pace. Conside the most downloaded apps of 2023 for iOS and Android (source: statista.com):
- Instagram (696 million downloads)
- TikTok (654 million downloads)
- Facebook (553 million downloads)
- WhatsApp (475 million downloads)
This is just mobile usage. If we consider total active user counts inclusive of personal computers and other devices, Facebook and Facebook Messenger alone clock in at a staggering 4 billion MAUs as of 2024 (source: investor.fb.com). That’s not even taking into account Instagram or WhatsApp.
Why is this a problem?
Facebook are answerable to no-one. Despite some lip service paid to the idea of regulation and the occasional token display of acquiescence to the likes of the US Congress and the European Commission, the reality is that Meta are a law unto themselves.
They decide what is allowed and what is not. They decide who can speak and who cannot. And when things don’t go your way, for whatever the reason may be, there is no recourse. You can’t appeal to a higher authority. You can’t even get a straight answer out of them.
This is fair enough for a private service, but when that service is the primary means of communication for billions of people, it becomes a different kind of problem.
It won’t always be as obvious as having your posts removed or account banned. It could be as subtle as the way your posts are shown to your friends - or not shown at all.
Consider the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a political consulting firm harvested the private data of over 80 million Facebook users without their consent. This data was used to psychologically profile voters and subsequently steer political advertising campaigns.
The public outrage over this case highlighted a disturbing bias. Many seemed concerned only because the data misuse was perceived as benefiting Donald Trump’s campaign. There was a glaring lack of equal outrage about the underlying issue of Facebook’s lax data privacy practices that enabled such a massive breach in the first place.
The unreliability of Facebook as an arbiter of truth is well-documented. But there are even more disturbing issues that highlight why Meta’s monopolistic control over social media discourse is so problematic.
One of the most abhorrent controversies has been Facebook’s failure to effectively combat the spread of child sexual abuse on its platforms. Despite hollow promises, evidence continues to mount that Facebook has turned a blind eye as predators use their services to exploit children and traffic in illicit content.
In 2020, a damning investigative report by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children revealed how lax moderation allowed private groups on Facebook to become havens for the trade of such material.
It’s perhaps arguable that some degree of problematic use is inevitable but it becomes much harder to defend when you consider that well over 90% of the almost 70 million child sex abuse images reported by US technology companies in 2020 were distributed through Meta’s platforms. It becomes even harder still when it was shown that, in the same year, almost 80% of U.S. underage sex trafficking victims recruited online were recruited through Facebook or Instagram.
These are some of the easier examples to highlight but they are sadly far from isolated incidents. Rather, they are a small part of an unrelenting pattern of prioritising profit and growth over privacy or safety. No single entity should be controlling the modern public square, but least of all one with Meta’s track record.