Privacy? Watchdogs? Fines? Whatever, nerds, more people than ever are using Facebook and filling its deep coffers Facebook is stronger than ever, despite the best efforts of the US government to rein it in over privacy and legal violations. The House of Zuck on Wednesday revealed gains [PDF] in revenues, daily active users, and mobile advertising in the second quarter of 2019, as it took those massive settlement fees in its stride. For …
More "people" are using Facebook.
Gordon Dimmack counted as hundreds of people in Facebook's statistics at the height of his internet marketing career and he was hardly prolific. Facebook's final form will be 200 billion advertising bots talking to each other while they try to find the last fleshy users in the noise, unaware that they died months ago.
"Net income was $2.6bn, a 49 per cent decrease on the quarter. This is largely due to a $2bn wedge Facebook coughed up, in addition to the $3bn already set aside, to foot the $5bn settlement fee"
On this basis the expected net income was $4.6bn per quarter. That means a $5bn fine wiped out more than a quarter's profits albeit spread over more than the single quarter.
Of course fines on any scale are a cost of doing business. What else could they be? They're not income, a loan or a capital investment. I'm not sure, however that fines wiping out a quarter's profits are just a cost of doing business. In any business with a sensible share structure the board would be being held to account by the shareholders. What you really need to look at is why this doesn't happen to FB.
Having written that it strikes me that the main difference between FB and most other corporations is that most other corporations are in thrall to a stock market that concentrates on quarterly results. Clearly Zuck is prepared to look long term. Perhaps there's a lesson there of sorts for other businesses.
They are never going to regulate themselves to anybody's satisfaction, if politicians lay down a set of rules, there will be droves of lawyers looking for the loopholes which will be exploited immediately. Any complaints will then be aimed at the politicians.
This is news?
FB and other so called social media sites are nowt more than digital drug pushers.
People get addicted to them. They dare not miss a tweet or post or anything for fear of becoming a social outcast with their similarly addicted friends.
The sooner these things come with health warnings the better as far as I'm concerned.
I've never been on FB and all my family have either come off it completely or only use it where there is no option (eg PTA meetings).
Stop using social media and get your life back.
"Stop using social media and get your life back."
A bit arrogant. I'm not a user of FB or any other social media platform. In my experience though, the people who are most avid social media users are (A) those who don't really appear to have much going on in their lives, or (B) don't have the opportunity to do much with their lives in the first place, and are using it to fill a hole. Then there are those that seem to need the attention and adulation of others to reinforce their own insecurities and get off on believing that others are really interested in what they are up to.
I guess in the middle of it all are lots and lots of other people who just use it to conveniently stay in touch and maybe post a few holiday snaps.
So in terms of "get your life back", please do tell... what sort of life do you have that enables you to take the high ground over those that maybe do want to use it for any of the above? As far as I can tell FB is no more an existential time filler as any other activity such as running, watching TV, cave diving or playing the fiddle.
"the people who are most avid social media users are (A) those who don't really appear to have much going on in their lives, or (B) don't have the opportunity to do much with their lives in the first place, and are using it to fill a hole."
A bit arrogant, presuming you can fit (very) roughly 3 billion social media users into two small boxes.
...but in wildfire country (Northern California) it's literally been a lifesaver. On 9/12/15, when the Valley Fire hit suddenly, fast, and hard, our notification came in the form of Reverse 911 calls.
The land lines were down in less than 2 hours. So they resorted to having 5 deputies driving house-to-house, usually evacuees saw them pulling up their driveways in their rearview mirrors.
They later estimated that 90% of the residents had self-evacuated - because it was hot & smokey, or they saw there was a fire on Facebook. It was chaos. A few of my friends had to drive thru a "wall of fire".
At Harbin, a local resort, they began evacuating some 800 guests, residents, & crew well ahead of the notification, which came when the fire was already upon them.
For the next 2 weeks we were glued to Facebook, as support groups, info groups, etc. were formed. Best wishes, prayers, and blessings were sent from around the world. Videos, maps, photos were posted, missing people were located, animal rescues were done, stories were shared, evac centers were set up, necessities were donated, friendships were formed. People in the fire area posted updates and encouragement for those of us on the outside. And during the recovery process we used Facebook to exchange information.
We still do, in fact. And every year, when fires hit other parts of California we go on Facebook to offer whatever help we can. . A CSI friend of mine said he'd never had much use for Facebook before the fire. It's funny though, isn't it?
I mean, Facebook, of all things. Who'd have thought?
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