> The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.

There is a Peter Thiel tactic of Monopolies where you deny you are monopolizing a sector by defining your company as "in competition" with a much larger and hazy market. The example in Zero To One is Google disguising its online advertising market by comparing itself to the total global advertising market, both online and offline.

I see the same tactic here, where Facebook is trying to hide its user data monopoly [3] by situating itself to general news, lifestyle discovery, and general communications. However this is counter to the actual internal communications where Facebook would discuss buying or crushing competitors, like Snapchat [0] [1] [2], as a way to maintain their hegemony.

Don't be fooled by what Facebook says about itself. Concentrate on what it values.

[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-developers-help-us-destr...

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/facebook-secretl...

[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/copycat-how-facebook-tried-to-sq...

[3]: https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2018/12/6/18127980/...

In other words, "We can't be a monopoly, we haven't even taken over the government yet"