Getting tired of Facebook

For about 74 million Filipinos, the unimaginable is happening: the social media platform Facebook is on a decline, and if its founder and parent company Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is to be believed, will continue to do so in the next couple of years.

Facebook’s popularity in the Philippines was at an all-time high of 76 million users in 2020, although during the third quarter of that year, Statista research showed Google’s YouTube already slightly edging out Facebook as Filipinos’ preferred app. You could regard that as an advance warning of things to come.

The breaking news over the weekend was a bigger shocker, at least to the business community, as Facebook closed 26 percent down in markets, shedding the biggest one-day loss for a US company of $230 billion from its market value. For Zuckerberg’s net worth, that represented a $29 billion loss.

Everybody is now surmising if Facebook’s waning popularity, as gleaned from the announced loss of one million users worldwide in the last quarter of 2021, will be the start of an irreversible trend, especially with other competing media platforms gaining faster popularity.

Statista, for example, has projected small decreases, but still representing a steady decline over a five-year period from 2022’s 73.15 million to 2026’s 69.58 million Facebook users in the Philippines, although its data crunching shows increasing numbers of the app’s users from other countries in Asia to more than compensate for the loss in the Philippines.

Competition and data misuse

In the face of growing user numbers of other formidable social media apps like TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, and Viber, all of which have either lured first time users or influenced tired Facebook to switch to new ones, how Zuckerberg’s empire (which includes Instagram and WeChat) will behave is not going to be easy to define.

Compounding the emerging competitive environment of old and new social media apps is the tightening of both regulatory oversight and advertising revenue channels for Facebook, a double whammy of sorts that largely affected its operations for some time now.

The misappropriation of user data continues to be a big thorn for Facebook, and this has spooked many to initially restrict their exposure in the social media platform or to eventually abandon logging in and generating content altogether.

This distrust is especially prevalent for users based in America, Europe, and Australia, where Facebook subscribers were particularly miffed by the company’s use of their personal data and preferences without prior consent, and before offering to install tougher privacy settings.

Investigations and studies have emerged wherein Facebook was found to have shared its users’ address book contents, as well as private messages and posts, with more than 150 external parties without users’ knowledge or permission.

Such unwarranted sharing of data helped the third parties to enrich their own subscribers’ log of habits and preferences, now more popularly known as algorithms, to suggest possible new content that “help” offer users’ a wider range of choices.

There’s a long list of reported problems of personal data misuse associated with Facebook, but one that takes the icing on the cake is its susceptibility to manipulation in highly controversial cases, such as politically motivated campaigns, conspiracy theory movements or the spread of misinformation or false news.

Anti-tracking app

The obnoxious social impact of Facebook’s shortcomings has led to a dent in its advertising earnings, something that matters a lot to its shareholding value. Anti-tracking initiatives, started by Apple early last year in its latest iPhone models, however, could bring longer-lasting damage.

When installed, the Apple shield automatically asks iPhone owners’ consent to track online activities from even existing apps; most of the one million iPhone users reportedly have denied the apps’ tracking ability. This reportedly represents a $10 billion loss in ad revenues for Facebook.

For Facebook, an app that would coax owners of smartphones and other electronic devices to disable tracking features before they are actually used, would be the ultimate disaster to its ability to earn. Such could also be the game-changer for other social media platforms that have followed Facebook’s revenue-generating model.

Apps that track your preferences to give you customize ads or links can be useful, but they are also reminders that what you had taken for granted as a free service, in fact, comes at a price – your personal privacy.

Let the Games go on

One other global event that marked my calendar last week signified profound changes in world politics, even as many countries both developed and developing continued to grapple with the pandemic: the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.

In spite and because of a diplomatic boycott by leading countries like the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and India, China President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, defiantly posed for a photo op during the opening days, a show of solidarity between two of the world’s opposing powers to democratic governance and processes.

For decades, we have gotten used to seeing pro-democracy countries successfully weigh in on their views in global sporting events, and this is the first time in so many centuries that the stage has been overtaken by autocratic overtones.

Nevertheless, the Winter Olympics successfully opened last Feb. 4 at the Beijing National Stadium in the presence of around 2,900 competing athletes, mostly avoiding openly expressing any political statement.

Only one Filipino qualified this year, the Philippines’ third consecutive appearance; Asa Miller will be competing in two events under Alpine skiing. We wish him all the luck.

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Should you wish to share any insights, write me at Link Edge, 2nd Floor, 139 Corporate Center, Valero Street, Salcedo Village, 1227 Makati City. Or e-mail me at [email protected]. For a compilation of previous articles, visit www.BizlinksPhilippines.net.