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Comment by x87678r | Hacker News Reader

There is no money in Semiconductors. US owns the social media industry and that is where the money is, not computers.

TSMC made $11B in profit in 2018, and that's only going up.

Tsmc made about 3 bil in free cash flow. Fb made about 20 billion. Social media is much more profitable than semiconductors. However that kind of thinking will leave your country screwed because if you don't have chips facebook doesn't work.

Social media industry is very fickle, as the rise of TikTok shows, not to mention far easier to replicate by any country which desires so.

Fickleness is the right word.

TikTok is the social media darling not long ago. Now it's in hot water because of privacy issues.

They may not be as much money in Semiconductors as there used to be, but there is a lot of power. If you end up in a war and your enemy can produce semiconductors while all you have is Facebook and Twitter, that's going to be a bad day.

US owns the social media industry and that is where the money is, not computers.

How does one have a social media industry without computers?

friggin' snail mail

do you really think social media(s) appear(s) only with computers?

All industries whose markets measure in the billions of dollars appear only with computers.

well, that might be true, if we measure social media in money

Snail mail is social contact, not social media. Just like calling your mom on the telephone is not social media.

No. My father friend used to be part of chess-over-mail society. He was participating in several competitions at the same time, and periodically was getting all country as well as regional bulletin on competition states, progress, tidbits etc. I was very fascinated by this whole setup...

And I heard as well that stamp collectors and coin collectors societies worked in the same way, bulletins, regional, all-country, exchanges etc.

Chinese people don't use US social media networks.

But the rest of the world does.

Very few countries currently block access to Facebook. (China, Iran, Syria, North Korea.)

And I think the situation is similar for other US-based social media sites such as Twitter.

But, this list could very easily grow. There are almost 200 countries in the world, and about one-third of those are authoritarian regimes, and at least another third could be classified as semi-authoritarian. That's a lot of countries which might be inclined to ban US social media and could do so in the future.

I think China could export its own social media services to authoritarian and semi-authoritarian governments in other parts of the world – a lot of those governments would be very interested in social media offerings with built-in tools to enable censorship and information manipulation.

> social media offerings with built-in tools to enable censorship and information manipulation

ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, Zuckerberg likes to have a word with you

If you haven't noticed, Apple, Microsoft, Firefox, and Brave are waging war against the business model of Facebook and Google. There are going to be billions of devices where tracking users across the web simply won't work any longer.

Chrome is the only major browser left that doesn't block 3rd party cookies, tracking and fingerprinting. We’re probably at peak Facebook right now.

Meanwhile, virtually every device needs semiconductors.

Are there any actually profitable social media companies?

Are you talking in dollars or rubles when you say profit?

Facebook is very very profitable, they pulled in almost $20B in net income in 2019.

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