My main takeaway from this is that #deleteFacebook has been a flash in the pan-- their active user count is still increasing across all regions. Also to note, FB only pay effectively 11% tax on some 12 billion dollars worth of revenue.
The best way to predict the effect of any social media campaign against a person or organization is to evaluate the steadfastness of the campaign's target.
If you are the target of an internet mob and you blink, you're not only going to enact mob-demanded changes that are detrimental to your interests, but also broadcast weakness and attract further mob attacks.
If you instead stand your ground and refuse to be cowed by hashtag campaigns, the outrage mob eventually gets bored and finds another target. Your interests are preserved and you end up broadcasting strength and determination.
A lot of people are starting to figure out that internet mobs have no real teeth.
http://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-uber-takedown...
Regardless of what you think of Uber, Travis Kalanick started a very large company, and Uber is as entrenched as ever.
So perhaps this actually is evidence in favor of the parent comment. Did Uber really suffer much at all? Or did they just reshuffle management, pay Kalanick billions to (kind of) leave, and continued business as usual?
Citations? I haven't really heard about them pulling any shenanigans under the new CEO's watch.
1. Happened a lot over the early do or die periods of entering new markets. 2. Continued over a much longer period of time than Travis has been gone. 3. Happened while the company was being considered a darling and was not being critically scrutinized over every move it made.
Shenanigans are truly shenanigans only once the outside world gets to know about it. Paradox of sorts really.
Continuing business as usual in the context of the parent's comment though is less about shenanigans and more about the operating model probably. Drivers are still being duped. Earth scorching ride subsidization tactics are still very much in play. Although the CEO is gone and there may be some activity happening within the company to undo toxic cultures, the overall business has not truly changed. And the overall business really ought to change.
Take for instance the case in michigan, where the Uber driver had a psychotic episode, and killed the people that were hiring him, over multiple rides over multiple hours, simply because he was the nearest driver. Uber had no infrastructure to locate a driver, or assist law enforcement in any meaningful, real time manner. Imagine if that happened in 2018, and the lack of critical infrastructure was laid that bare by a multi billion dollar tech company testing out it's latest business tweak.
In some ways, it's not much different from an organized crime structure. The main reason organized crime is able to get away with all of their crime for long enough to even establish itself is good legal representation, to help stay ahead of their regulators.
You’re not forced to be on Facebook but if you’re not then you’re the one person people will always need to do extra work to invite. And that’s for friends, without Facebook you won’t even hear about public events until after they have happened.
Don’t get me wrong, we always invite the two guys without Facebook, but I know both of them feel a little shitty about having to be extra trouble.
Eventually people will leave, and someone have to take the first step, but that’s a really shitty step. The reason I say eventually, is because nobody uses Facebook for anything but events, I haven’t used messenger since they forced you to use the app and I’m not the only one and when I look at my news feed none of my close friends (or myself) have posted anything since New Years.
So Facebook have become a satellite network we check for events, and that’s one step from being obsolete.
This is anecdotal of course, but it is true for both my and my wife’s friend circles.
From the article you pointed at:
By mid-February, #deleteuber had slowed to a trickle and Uber's top executives were exhausted. Kalanick and Michael booked their trip to Malibu for what was supposed to be a weekend of rest and recovery. Instead, Kalanick was reading Fowler's post.. [which] had already gone viral.
The classic example is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which had calls for boycotts prior to its release. Guess what those same people bought and played when the game released?
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/973/082/6e0...
We'll need to exactly define and agree what it is to be achieve tho. In my view, I think the point has been made and have been heard successfully and have caused the desired punch in the face.
Honestly, people probably don't give enough credit to the MW2 "boycott"; it showed kids that they could organize if the company's practices got out of hand. I think the MW2 and BF2 issues were really part of a longer trend towards dark patterns in video games, and it took time for people in positions of authority to realize how serious the situation could become if they continued down the path they were on.
But I work adjacent to some video game industry business strategy folks... and I can say that the various EA/microtransaction/season pass/pay2win boycotts haven't convinced anyone that those are the wrong way to go.
People in the industry are generally convinced that the golden goose is getting people to pay more than full price and now there are just footnote conversations about "can we get away this"
People in the industry needs get people to pay more than full price whether they like it or not.
In some ways this should be self evident. If they had the tools or connections to enact real change, they wouldn't be forming mobs on social media.
I run a successful s/w company that was recently under targeted attacks by one of these hashtag campaigns. The gist was we wrote something about why we refused to hire women simply to improve the % of females in tech and why we want to hire the best people for the job irrespective of their gender. The goal of the post was to help people correctly contribute to gender ratio problems instead of blanket hiring, which is sexism by itself.
However, this backfired and a lot of feminist groups targeted us with hashtags and some even accusing us of things we never said/done (the blog post has been removed since). They created memes, fake citations of stuff me and my company staff didn't say and they revolted heavily.
At first I was really shocked as this was my first time experiencing something like this and I almost thought my company and brand name was doomed. However, I decided to take control and published a follow up post of things we said, we did, we didn't do and we decided to stand by our words. The hashtags multiplied, some even threatened us legal action. Many created fake accounts on our blogs and commented bad stuff about us everywhere. Some of them even sent emails directly to our customers!
But, I didn't give in. A week went by and things started looking better. The hashtags dropped, but the good thing was, from those hashtags, we got a LOT of new page-views and signups. We lost two customers who didn't want to be associated with our controversy, but we got 8 new ones after this campaign.
The biggest take away -
1) If you believe in something, don't give in to threats and disrespectful demands. It's almost like supporting extortion.
2) Any free marketing is good marketing.
I suppose this was no different for Facebook.
Cure vs prevention. If you write a blog on behalf of a business, perhaps ask someone to read it over - preferably someone who holds the views you seek to attack.
But no. Somehow, even with a declining youth demographic and widespread reports of less time spent on site and the CA fiasco, they still ended up with a growth of users in all markets.
I've wondered sometimes whether we're headed towards a post-privacy world, and what it'll look like -- not just one in which there is little privacy, but one in which privacy is not something that most people think about or value.
I think we already live in that reality. The media really honed in on the sharing of your friends list in the case of CA but if you think about it, there are plenty of services where that is public by default (like Twitter). I don't think most people consider that to be sensitive information.
Targeted ads are fine to me. My bigger concern is the vast amount of data sharing on the back end that is easily non-anonymized and FB is a huge part of the problem.
This is actually the widespread attitude I imagine in a post-privacy world. It's different from people not understanding the implications of targeted ads and unknowingly accepting it. In this case, it's people that (presumably) understand this, and say, "well, that's okay."
My main frain from using facebook is not so much the visibility but the permanent nature of having personal stuff on the internet. I wonder how other people caring about what goes public deal with the issue.
If post-privacy worked both ways, I'm all for a future like that, it would be a transparency utopia.
Senator Dick Durbin: Would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?
Mark Zuckerberg: Um... [Long hesitation] No.
Senator Dick Durbin: If you messaged anybody this week, would you share with us the names of the people you've messaged?
Mark Zuckerberg: Senator, no, I would probably not choose to do that publicly here.
Post-Privacy means no one can get privacy even if they want it. That has never been the case.
What you are merely seeing is people are ok with the amount of data that has been collected on them. The lack of true widespread outrage means we are either at the limit or we can still collect a bit more before users get really pissed.
We are already there.
3-letter govt agencies can listen track your calls, intercept your browsing and read your email.
Unless you pay in cash and shop only at your local mom and pop shop, your purchases are already being tracked and reported.
Your cellphone carrier is selling your information to third parties.[1]
You may not be on Facebook or WhatsApp but all your IRL friends and family are. They have your phone number in their contacts list and they have shared it with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and God knows how many other companies. They have taken your pictures and tagged you.
Other than a very small number of privacy-conscious people, which includes living-off-the-grid doomsday preppers, the rest of the country is already there.
1. https://www.csoonline.com/article/3233211/security/mobile-ca...
Constraining the discussion to America, you’d be far more wrong to assume someone doesn't use the internet[1][2] or a cellphone.[3][4]
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/05/some-america... - Only 11% of American adults don’t use the internet. Of 18-24 year olds, only 2% don’t. 2%. Holding narrowly onto your assertion, the numbers are higher for poor, rural, elderly and non-high school graduates.
[2]http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-20... - 68% of adults use Facebook. 73% use YouTube. Looking at 18-24 year olds, 95% use YouTube.
[3]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/28/10-facts-abo... - 77% of adults own a smartphone.
[4]http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/ - 95% of adults own a cellphone.
Shopping at mega corps? Well, it’s well documented that Walmart has done a good job of decimating local economies and there is definitely a homogenization of retail options in the US - but even if you don’t shop at one of them, if you use a credit or debit card, a mega-corp is tracking you. Doubly so if you use a smartphone.
The earning statement is for Jan 1- Mar 31 ONLY.
The Cambridge Analytica story was released around March 18.
So around 10-12 days of #DeleteFacebook would NOT have any noticeable effect on their earnings.
What would actually be noticeable would be Q2 Earnings (Apr 1- Jun 30)
The fact is, if it hasn’t been observed by then it’s probably not happening at all.
That's a big assumption. The metrics we're shown might not have enough resolution to show the effects of 10-12 days of scandal. The fallout may be a much more gradual process than you assume.
For instance: take this scenario: someone decides to #deletefacebook, even though they use it daily as a communications tool. What do you think they'll do? You seem to assume they're ragequit immediately, but I think it's far more likely that they'll dial back their usage, explore replacements for certain features, exchange alternate contact info with FB-only friends, etc. Only much later will they actually delete or show a significant usage decrease.
That scenario isn't hypothetical, it's exactly what I'm doing. I've made the decision to disengage from Facebook, but I still show up as an active user because I'm not done with the process.
If you're going to measure a phenomenon with data, you have to understand what you're measuring and have an instrument that will detect that. Otherwise, it's just sciency voodoo.
So it is because Facebook is primarily meant for the latter type of data that most people outside of a very vocal minority don’t have a problem with their privacy practices. That, combined with legislation that will decimate any chance for the rise of a viable Facebook competitor (such as GDPR), is why their numbers will continue to grow for decades to come.
I think it largely depends on who your friends are, and who you follow. All the people I follow on twitter for tech news were ranting and raving about all the FB scandals. Not a single one of my friends or people I follow outside of the tech bubble cared about it, most had no idea. If people spend their time on FB and insta, it's not hard to understand why they wouldn't even be aware of what was going on.
Global growth is not necessarily a sign of health for a company, in the long term.
Say, if I check my FB twice a month to stay informed about events I might participate in, I'm still counted as a monthly active user, but I'm not active in a meaningful sense.
Similarly, many people might stop interacting with FB (which, if nothing else, takes time to register: at least a month).
Personally, I logged in for the last time in (I believe) 2012, but I won't delete my account just so my name stays "reserved".
This stock is going to be back to its 190 price levels soon enough and anyone who isn’t on board is going to be left with the FOMO.
If we see a significant dip in Q2, then perhaps we can surmise that this impacted revenues negatively.
Not only that. Most people welcome the attention. The people who are fighting for privacy of their friends and family are the ones who don't get it. Friends and Family want to be out there, in the public eye, liked and commented on.
Point is, if you are upset, and I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't be, then the focus should be on the difference between tax on income vs capital gains / dividend income.
The first 6/7 is a condescending description of something obvious that doesn't respond to the OP's post, then reads histrionics into the post, then in the final sentences veers towards a real explanation, only to leave the rest as an unobvious exercise to the reader.
You’ll also have the problem we already have today, where individuals would construct their lives around a closely held corporation. When the corporation is closely held, income is supposed to pass through to the individual for taxation, but the incentives to evade theose rules would be much stronger.
In my perfect world most government revenue would come from land value taxes, with a smattering of Pigovian taxes on top, to the extent that the bureaucracy required to levy them wasn’t too onerous.
My ideal practical tax would be just a straight sales tax and nothing else. Income = Consumption + Savings, and since we want to encourage savings and investment it seems better and simpler to just do it that way.
Total libertarian dream scenario is no taxes, and government funds it self via slight inflation as a tax.
You just about have to make a million dollars per year in the US - and be in California or NYC - to pay 50%. One million dollars in income gets you to about 47% in LA, SF, or NYC. A quarter of a million dollar income will get you up to 35% - and those are the most expensive tax locations in the country.
$50,000 (the US median full-time income) gets you a combined effective rate, before deductions, of: 16% in Dallas, 20% in LA, 23% in Portland, 16% in Seattle, 24% in NYC, and 22% in Boise.
In Seattle, Miami, or Dallas, you'll pay a combined 36% on one million dollars in income.
Lots of people in Europe. Which for sure is also a big market for FB. In Germany you are already have deductions of nearly 50% if your income is around 50000€.
According to [1], the gross/net difference would be about 34 % in the worst case (highest tax class, no children, not married etc.), which includes social security, health insurance and so on. The calculator gives realistic results for my own income.
Netto: 2.456,06 € 29.472,66 €
which means 40% deductions. Which is approximately what I meant (yes, 50% was slightly too high).
No, it doesn't.
It put you—in 2017, the number is lower in 2018—assuming no deductions—at a combined 37.3% marginal rate, but a substantially lower overall rate.
With the “and other witholdings” it's pretty easy to hit, as typical withholdings beyond income tax include state and federal payroll taxes, employee share of group health insurance and HSA withholdings, pre-tax parking withholdings, retirement contributions, etc.
If the government here offered a quality of life equivalent to what I experienced living in western europe I'd be fine with it. But we are not getting my 35% worth of government service
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/24/facebook-may-make-tons-of-mo...
Facebook has begun running TV ads to counter anti-Facebook sentiment:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/25/17280902/facebook-ad-abou...
They have also replaced their chief privacy officer with a former FCC chairman.
Having said that, there's movers in the space - we just need more adoption. I'm looking at a new wave of products like Sociall to step up: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sociall
Though maybe there's already existing products out there that could pivot to claim some of facebook's space.
However, I can't see how I increase their revenues with that one 60 seconds (or less) session per month. And I am quite sure there are lots of people doing the same.
Many users don't delete their accounts, but keep using messenger only. Messenger still works even if you disable your account (but others will not be able to find you by search).
I was also blown away at their low effective tax rate.
Also, the tax figures have seasonality. Q4 is highest, Q1 is lowest. This quarter's effective rate was up by 100 basis pts yoy.
Some coverage, subtitled:
https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/304jmbv5l/california-north...
It's the same for Google. Might be a weird one-off due to the new tax law.
https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2018Q1_alphabet_earnings_releas...
You also can't expect to see the full impact of Cambridge Analytica scandal so soon. Let's see what happens over the next 12 months. Facebook engagement was already in free-fall last year, and I imagine a lot of people disengaged with Facebook after this scandal, and they plan on using it much less in the future, even if they don't actually delete their accounts. Eventually all of these scandals (as well as the future ones) will catch-up with Facebook.
http://buzzsumo.com/blog/facebook-engagement-brands-publishe...
Interesting this is the exact same number Google posted yesterday. I guess I should just incorporate myself for tax purposes. Sure must be nice.
I don't know. Think I've observed a general drop in engagement in my relatively well-off and educated social circle. If Facebook dies, it's not going to be sudden. #deletefacebook type-stuff may be more akin to lifestyle advertising than the buy-it-now kind.
There are clearly very intelligent people and seemingly without a conscience, and who even admit that they would do things in untraceable ways, including in part under and between different company names; not a stretch to imagine activities happen on no books with no trackable gain given in exchange -- or even in plain sight however people erring on the side of doubt and disbelief. We have the evidence smacking us in the face every day though. The result of Cambridge Analytica's activities, seemingly along with Russia's help - directly or indirectly I'm not sure, is getting someone like Trump into office, along with apparently winning elections in other nations around the world.
I'd say very high-stakes they're playing for, positioning someone in as President of the United States to align with Russian motives, along with the shit going on with Syria and nerve agents actively being used.
It's certainly rallying the world to align for good, to align for accountability - against those who are acting bad.