Yes but what you’re missing is that constantly posting white supremacist calls to violence doesn’t influence any users.
Every other major tech company? If you want to argue that FB shouldn’t have been allowed to buy IG and WhatsApp then maybe I agree, but as it stands they have plenty of competition for whatever their business is
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Twitter and Facebook are competitors in your opinion?
Yes? All of these tech companies competing for your time/attention so they can sell your data for targeted ads are in competition with one another. Regardless, I don’t see how FB fits into any legal definition of ‘monopoly’ - there are much better arguments for specific parts of Amazon and Google AFAIK but IANAL
Why didn’t MySpace coexist with Facebook?
I dunno. Probably because they sucked at technology and couldn’t figure out how to prevent their site from being nothing but spam that crashed your browser. Did Facebook fix prices or somehow block a superior product from entering the market? What is a monopoly?
Why can Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, IG (FB), LinkedIn and all the others coexist with Facebook?
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I’m an internet fool but aren’t there a bunch Twitter like sites? Facebooks Instagram I thought was one.
Anything that takes up your time on the internet is a competitor to FB, including UP…
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Because they all occupy different, distinct social media spaces. Facebook and MySpace occupied more or less the exact same social media space, and because of the network effect there could be only one winner. And that winner has monopolistic power.
I mean this is obviously wrong. These “different, distinct social media spaces” you’re describing are just feature sets. They’re UX patterns. Sharing pictures, posting a status, etc. Snapchat invented Stories - now every single platform in the world has Stories. Snapchat is still doing great even though FB and IG legally stole their idea.
These companies don’t share their population data, but lots of people have left FB for different platforms. It’s largely just a boomer right wing meme site now afaik and all of my friends use Twitter, IG and Snapchat for the same purposes as FB.
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I’m not saying that the network advantage gained by social media companies is permanent – it’s obviously not. I know no young person uses Facebook, or if they do it’s just to humor their parents. But whatever social media network the most people in a group use, eventually everyone will use it. And in Facebook’s decline with young people you’re seeing young people use social media in a different way from their parents, but again coalescing into very few platforms. Because the more of their peers use any particular platform, the more useful it is to everyone. That gives those social media companies tremendous and durable power and influence. Just because it isn’t permanent power or totally unchallengable power doesn’t mean it isn’t problematic.
Ok but we’ve gone from “they’re a monopoly” to “they have a problematic amount of power”
My argument here is they aren’t a monopoly. I agree they have a lot of power and influence in problematic ways.
All I’m saying is that they will inevitably accumulate tremendous amounts of concentrated power. Because you can’t have a hundred twitters competing, you’ll just end up with one or two similar services. Which seems like a natural monopoly situation to me, and why the “start your own X” argument is dumb. If you want to say it’s not a perfect monopoly like the phone company, sure. It isn’t.
Why can’t there be as many social media adjacent tech companies as there are car companies? You can’t just start your own car company - it’s actually much harder than starting a tech company, but we are doing fine with cars iyam
The network effect is less with cars, although it kind of exists with stuff like a sufficient network of dealerships. But it doesn’t matter if car ownership is equally split between like four different car manufacturers, there’s no peer to peer network effect, as long as each car has enough infrastructure to support its sales and maintenance.
But you’re right that the capital barrier to entry is much higher in cars than in tech. So the barrier isn’t the capital cost to produce the platform, the barrier is becoming one of the dominant networks in that social media space.
Twitter in no way, shape or form is a monopoly.
Facebook is a different story with much bigger issues.
What does Twitter monopolize? Twitter is relatively small compared to the total number of interactions on the internet. There are so many ways people interact on the internet. Facebook is the only real contender as a monopoly there.
Google is a monopoly on search. However if you know what search was like before Google… Google revolutionized internet search. Microsoft spent tens of billions trying to compete. Yahoo billions. The problem is doing search is ridiculously hard to do and your are up against literally a billion people trying to game and break it. Google has built up the knowledge and infrastructure over 20 plus years that makes them nearly unassailable. I think separating search from the rest of alphabet would make a lot of sense so Google stops leveraging search into other areas.
I don’t think messing with Google search itself is anything but a huge disaster.
You really do not have a good grasp on these technology companies and how they work.
I agree that Twitter is far less problematic than Facebook or google. You can more or less sort these tech companies by market cap to determine how serious a problem they are.
Apple’s been censoring you a lot recently have they?
Like, we should really point out here that after 2016 when people were mad at FB they hired “fact checkers” and the daily caller was among those to brought in.
Who decides what pornography is? The government or some unelected technocrats?
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