Can Facebook be replaced?

It's hard to imagine that any social media startup could possibly replace Facebook, given just how big FB has become, and how much of a lead they have in building their network and their database of your data. But it turns out that some aren't willing to simply accept FB's continued dominance in the social media space as fait accompli, and are putting their money where their mouths are to jumpstart a viable competitor to Mark Zuckerberg's troubled giant.

From The Guardian:

Can Facebook be replaced? The prominent Silicon Valley investor Jason Calacanis, who was an early investor in several high-profile tech companies including Uber certainly hopes so. He has launched a competition to find a “social network that is actually good for society”.

The Openbook Challenge will offer seven “purpose-driven teams” $100,000 in investment to build a billion-user social network that could replace the technology titan while protecting consumer privacy.

“We want to invest in replacements that don’t manipulate people and that protect our democracy from bad actors looking to spread misinformation,” the challenge website states.

The seven winning teams will be invited to join Calacanis’s Launch incubator, offering them 12 week of mentorship as they develop their social network.

“All community and social products on the internet have had their era, from AOL to MySpace, and typically they’re not shut down by the government – they’re slowly replaced by better products,” said Calacanis in a blogpost announcing the challenge. “So, let’s start the process of replacing Facebook.”

And that's just the first new wrinkle of the day in Facebook.
They've also finally made their moderation guidelines public, and those guidelines are something of an incoherent mess, as reported by The Verge:

Facebook has finally made its moderation guidelines officially available to the public in full and boy is this a fascinating glimpse into a convoluted set of rules that once censored the entire ACLU Facebook page over a post about ... wait for it ... censorship.

[...]

It’s not the first time the public has gotten to see Facebook’s internal logic in action — portions were published from documents leaked to the Guardian last year — but this time, Facebook is posting its Community Standards to gather input from users.

[...]

Today’s published guidelines — a series of vague pronouncements peppered with brief interludes of oddly specific breakdowns — might make you feel sorry for the moderator who’s trying to apply them. Every time a bizarrely detailed exception is tacked on, you can almost imagine the actual case scenario that prompted them to revise the guidelines.

And then there's this piece, from Motherboard, about the Facebook's history of hosting stolen identities for years:

Cybercriminals have posted sensitive personal information, such as credit card and social security numbers, of dozens of people on Facebook and have advertised entire databases of private information on the social platform. Some of these posts have been left up on Facebook for years, and the internet giant only acted on these posts after we told it about them.

As of Monday, there were several public posts on Facebook that advertised dozens of people’s Social Security Numbers and other personal data. These weren’t very hard to find. It was as easy as a simple Google search.

[...]

Most of the posts appeared to be ads made by criminals who were trying to sell personal information. Some of the ads are several years old, and were posted as “public” on Facebook, meaning anyone can see them, not just the author’s friends.

Independent security researcher Justin Shafer alerted Motherboard to these posts Monday.

“I am surprised how old some of the posts are and that it seems Facebook doesn’t have a system in place for removing these posts on their own,” Shafer told Motherboard in an online chat. “Posts that would have words flagged automatically by their system.”

This is the environment in which Facebook are due to post their most recent quarterly earnings report. Normally, market-watchers focus entirely on the earnings number (the top line), or even the earnings-per-share number, rather than drilling down to assess the overall health of a company or their realistic prospects for the future, but there are already signs that this time may be different for FB, as reported by CNBC:

Usually there's little to complain about for the company that has come to dominate the digital ad industry, making billions in quarterly sales. [...] But money may take a back seat to engagement — how many people are logging on each day and how much time they spend on the platform — when Facebook reports its quarterly earnings on Wednesday after the bell.

When Facebook last reported in January, the number of daily active users dropped for the first time in North America, falling from 185 million in the third quarter to 184 million in the fourth quarter. On top of that, Facebook's pledge to clamp down on purported "clickbait" reduced the amount of time users spent on its social network by 50 million hours a day in the quarter, or 5 percent.

Since then, Facebook has endured backlash surrounding its failure to ensure that third parties had deleted stores of personal data. Those concerns, around a firm called Cambridge Analytica, built upon previous allegations of Russian agents meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

"Should recent negative engagement trends in North America and Europe persist, we believe forward engagement estimates could prove optimistic," Stifel analysts wrote on Monday. "Overall, we continue to see heightened risk around regulation, consumer trust, and consumer usage levels of the platform."

So... we have normally-bullish-on-Facebook Wall Street analysts watching to see just how badly Facebook's fiasco have hurt them; new revelations about Facebook's pattern of ongoing failure to protect the privacy and security of their own users, to the point of hosting stolen identity data; new revelations about the incoherent mess that are Facebook's moderation guidelines, clearly showing that they haven't been nearly as serious about tackling those issues as they needed to be, either; and at least one well-funded investor who is actively searching for new social media models to fund. It must be a day ending in "y" for Facebook.

Facebook's problems really are just beginning.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#DeleteFacebook