Comment by PhantomHour
2 days ago
The answer is fairly straightforward. It's fraud, and lots of it.
A honest businessman wouldn't put their company into a stock bubble like this. Zuckerberg runs his mouth and tells investors what they want to hear, even if it's unbacked.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this valuable because so much of the value is derived from ad-fraud that Facebook is both party to and knows about.
A honest businessman would never have gotten Facebook this big because it's growth relied extensively on crushing all competition through predatory pricing, illegal both within the US and internationally as "dumping".
Bear in mind that these are all bad as they're unsustainable. The AI bubble will burst and seriously harm Meta. They would have to fall back on the social media products they've been filling up with AI slop. If it takes too long for the bubble to burst, if zuckerberg gets too much time to shit up Facebook, too much time for advertisers to wisen up to how many of their impressions are bots, they might collapse entirely.
The rest of Big Tech is not much better. Microsoft and Google's CEOs are fools who run their mouth. OpenAI's new "CEO of apps" is Facebook's pivot-to-video ghoul.
As I've said in other comments - expecting honesty and ethical behavior from Mark Zuckerberg is a fool's errand at best. He has unchecked power and cannot be voted out by shareholders.
He will say whatever he wants and because the returns have been pretty decent so far, people will just take his word for it. There's not enough class A shares to actually force his hand to do anything he doesn't want to do.
Zuckerberg started as a sex pest and got not an iota better.
But we could, as a society, stop rewarding him for this shit. He'd be an irrelevant fool if we had appropriate regulations around the most severe of his misdeeds.
Unfortunately I think that ship has sailed.
And since we live in the era of the real golden rule (i.e "he who has the gold makes the rules), there's no chance that we'll ever get the chance to catch the ship. Mark lives in his own world, because we gave him a quarter trillion dollars and never so much as slapped him on the wrist.
What is a good resource to read about the ad fraud? This is the first I'm hearing of that.
I used to work in adtech. I don't have any direct information but, I assume this relates to the persistent rumours that Facebook inflates impressions and turns a blind eye to bot activity.
Ha ha.
You used “honest” and “businessman” in the same sentence.
Good one.