We’re Fine Without Facebook, German and French Ministers Say
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This is disproportionately so much worse for Facebook, than it is for German/French users.
1) Let's assume that German/French users are absolutely shattered to lose Facebook. If they are that hurt, they will probably do at least a basic Google search to find out why they can't access FB anymore. And what they will find is that FB preferred cutting them out rather than not transferring their data to the US.
I suspect that people would be split between (a) surprise that FB is storing their data, (b) surprise that FB has been sending their data to the US, (c) shocked that FB would choose to end operations than not send data to the US (which would immediately make them suspicious why they want to send data to the US), (d) have jingoistic anti-FB sentiments, etc.
I can't see a significant cohort that would be unhappy that their governments stood the ground on their data not being sent to the US. Even if you don't understand why the governments did this, you'd be wondering what FB has to hide that they can't keep the data in France/Germany.
2) Many people may not see FB as such a huge loss. There are many alternatives that could fill their social media addictions.
3) If there isn't a huge outcry for FB, that would shatter the aura of invincibility FB currently holds in the social media space. That aura has already been marginally dented with their latest quarterly results, but to see FB completely disappear from the 2 biggest European economies and life continuing as basically normal will be a huge blow to FB.
It will raise a whole lot of questions everywhere else. More authoritarian regimes will threaten to cut out FB if they don't help censor, etc. the way those regimes want them to. Privacy focused regimes would hold the threat of cutting out FB if it doesn't impose greater privacy protection. etc.
I don't see how FB can win here besides France/Germany folding, which I seriously doubt will happen.
That said I also think they'll forget about Facebook in a week or two and move to tiktok or where ever their friends/memes go.
I'm being misanthropic but I really do think this is how it would go down.
There are pretty significant cohort in Russia that slaps our government for LinkedIn ban. For exact same reason.
There are >400 million monthly active Facebook users in Europe today [1]. It is pretty absurd to think that a substantial amount of them would prefer losing access to Facebook over an EU mandate, especially considering most people are likely aware at this point that Facebook is using their data.
I don't think this issue is as clear cut as you and many other posters here see it. I find that the EU's decision can overwhelm legitimate services that may not be able to comply with this regulation, and I also see it as part of their intention to build a China-like firewall eventually - they are already trying to shutdown Telegram, for example.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/745400/facebook-europe-m...
I would contend most facebook users are not, as they are broadly either poorly informed or very old.
So imho this can not happen soon enough, people think the EU is actually protecting them when it isn't. I hope more countries join as well
I doubt a majority of Facebook users would agree with it being prevented from operating in European Union due to their servers being in the US. This is a precedent that can and will lead to undue internet restrictions in the future. So while I share your concern that we should do more regarding data protection, I'm not sure this is the way to go.
The far majority of my social circle doesn't use Facebook and removed their accounts with all the bells and whistles years ago
Imo DNS banning software that is breaking privacy laws is not to much to ask to. Anyone can use a different DNS, nobody cares.
I am usually against banning, but we ban other dangerous scam things too in order to protect customers because sorrily this is the best we have.
Most people who rely on it are business, and they stay in to compete with businesses who are also in it. If nobody has access to it they will just rely on other means, their own personnal website, other social medias that would fill the gap...
Most individual would be annoyed at first as well, but then all end up migrating to the another thing once the dust settle. More than facebook, this would be more the loss of instagram and whatsapp that would annoy them but they would easily move to telegram and signal. Many non-tech people already have a telegram account for example but don't move out of whatsapp because they are all on it already. Nobody wants to be that guys asking anyone else to abandon the group and move to somewhere else just for the heck of moving. As for instagram, they would quickly switch to tiktok, snapchat or something else that fills the gap.
I'd like to think open source and decentralized tool would have en edge but I am very doubtful it would happen. It is always easier to migrate to a single jail cell than being free.
Anyway, Facebook/Meta has just filled a form to cover their ass. They aren't threatening to leave EU. If they have to keep and manage the data in EU they will find a way. It will just be costly and hurt their finances hence the obligation for them to mention the riskier route.
Telegram's servers are in Russia, and Tiktok's are in China. If shutting down Facebook in the European Union means people are going to switch to those other apps, that would defeat the purpose of this initiative. I would also disagree that they are equivalent, I cannot imagine my mom migrating to any other social media if Facebook ceases to be available. She would likely go and protest this measure actually.
I agree this is likely a bluff, I just disagree that we should not seriously consider the actual costs of blocking over 400 million people from doing what they want to do. Also note that ultimately this could be viewed as a protectionist measure, so Europe-based social media companies would have a big advantage. I'm not sure I'm ok with that either.
AFAIK they are not, they are spread between a couple of data centers
You can find in this [reddit post](1) the list of ip's and locations from (2) with the geo-ip location
1) https://www.reddit.com/r/Telegram/comments/q81kg8/comment/hq...
And if they dig into it even slightly they will probably be even more horrified at Facebook once they find out they lost Facebook because it considered transferring their data to the US more important than having them as a user.
(e) blame the local politicians for destroying their internet.
Especially with the crowd that uses Instagram or Facebook, data protection laws are not something they consider, they want their little bubbles to continue working. Politicians risk alienating the young (who will most likely start sending their data to some Chinese company instead) and the mid-aged-to-elderly, low-educated, which is their main election pool.
Their Q4 earnings had some conservative projections and higher expenses due to investments in building out their VR teams, and this was enough of a catalyst that the short sellers were able to create a panic.
Fine to hate the company and management, and their politics, but following the money, this seems to be a wildly successful effort to manipulate sentiment and cause retail investors to panic and benefit short sellers in the market. There’s huge money to be made by hedge funds in shorting Meta on the way down, and then buying it again on the way up.
Or maybe they’re really going down to $0 … which is more likely?
Of course it's a big claim, but I don't quite see why this is suddenly over all the media for such an obvious stock disclaimer.
That's a very limited view on FB. Here are some uses I know of:
- FB group where company directors meet discuss business issues
- FB groups used for planning local sport/activity groups
- FB Marketplace which displaced the original eBay concept where Gumtree is not popular
- groups for organising conferences
If you're looking at FB users and see only social media addicts, you're ignoring a large variety of users.
Forums
>FB groups used for planning local sport/activity groups
Forums
>FB Marketplace which displaced the original eBay concept where Gumtree is not popular
Craiglist
>groups for organising conferences
Forums
Personally I just don't see why an average user would care about FB not complying with this regulation. Once you type in your data into FB - FB has it, it really doesn't matter where FB's servers physically are, you're no longer in control. The only winning move is not to play, er, not to use social networks at all.
i) Business pages that are easy to create and maintain for small, local business owners
ii) Facebook events for listing information and keeping in touch with registered attendees, as well as event discovery for users
iii) The importance for certain creators hosting their content and connecting with their user base on Instagram (assuming that would be also cancelled, as it is owned by Meta)
iv) Controversial due to the privacy implications, but a lot of companies rely on paying for Facebook advertisements to survive (which is driving why Meta is valued so highly on the stock market).
A tech-savvy user can create a website (or hire someone to); move to Eventbrite or equivalent; change photo-sharing apps to VSCO or equivalent; and back up their messages.
But many people don't know these are even options, or lack the funds and technical skills to do this (because their specialties are in non-tech fields, for small business owners and people in certain creative fields). The bottom line is that Meta and its constituent of Facebook are valued highly for important use cases that can't be easily dismissed.
There are probably already a number of EU companies in the space that could quickly be filling in these gaps. It would take some time to settle and have a dominant popular destination/network.
Businesses would favor this change, since they would no longer have to pay WhatsApp for every conversation they initiate after exceeding their free tier.*
People who chat a lot use something different either way because WhatsApp lacks all the cool features.
It depends on the countries. Some countries in Europe use Telegram and Messenger a lot (never heard of any where Signal is popular), others are virtually a WhatsApp monoculture.
Not that it matters much. Using phone numbers as ID makes things relatively portable: it makes it much easier to adopt a new app, but if Whatsapp shut down tomorrow everyone would be able to easily find each other on Telegram/Signal. Very different from rebuilding a social network from scratch.
But good point. Even thought I don't like the number requirement it will and does it make it easy for people to change.
> i) Business pages that are easy to create and maintain for small, local business owners
Business directories such as Yelp and Google Maps (Google Business Profile) allow businesses to maintain an online presence comparable to a Facebook page.
Business owners can also build websites without needing advanced technical skills with WordPress.com, Squarespace, or Wix. This takes more work than a directory listing, but designing a site with these tools isn't much harder than making a slide presentation.
> ii) Facebook events for listing information and keeping in touch with registered attendees, as well as event discovery for users
Meetup and Eventbrite do what Facebook events do. Mobilizon is a decentralized FOSS alternative. These other sites already exist, so people would already need a search engine to discover events across all of them.
Users migrating to these sites would need to learn how to use them, but I don't think using something like Eventbrite is significantly harder than using Facebook.
> iii) The importance for certain creators hosting their content and connecting with their user base on Instagram (assuming that would be also cancelled, as it is owned by Meta)
Instagram users would migrate to other social media platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and Reddit. Professional photographers would also use photo hosting sites like Smugmug/Flickr or 500px to showcase their photos. Pixelfed is the fediverse equivalent to Instagram.
> iv) Controversial due to the privacy implications, but a lot of companies rely on paying for Facebook advertisements to survive (which is driving why Meta is valued so highly on the stock market).
Brands and advertisers follow their target market. Whichever social media platforms the Facebook and Instagram users migrate to, the brands would use to advertise.
Facebook closing down would inconvenience its users in the short term, but the affected users would adapt by switching to alternatives. The people who don't know about these alternatives would know about them as soon as Facebook leaves, since these services would be publicized by the media and by former Facebook users.
FB was smart enough to go into business fields. A social network is replaceable. But what FB has become is not.
As much as I hate to admit it, they are very good at what they do.
If they sense blood in the water, you'll have Eurobook in a week, and that's that.
What could work is what many (most?) European startups do - pretend to try to capture the market, get acquired by a large company before shit hits the fan and when it predictably fails it's not your problem anymore.
Upon Meta’s absence, there would be a robust market response to overcome this “lack of knowledge” gap. Marketing outfits of all sizes and SaaS platforms that handle these things for the non-Meta markets would find new business opportunities and marketing spends would connect consumers to their new options. It would be incredibly fine.
Events being not on Facebook is getting common again because it doesn't make sense to host events in a platform that more than 50% of people in some age groups simply refuse to use.
Not sure about ads, personally I only wasted money on Facebook. I am getting better ad results, with less fishy clicks, everywhere else. (I stopped using FB ads when they started to send traffic from countries I did not order but counted them.)
From my understanding the dependency on Facebook here in central Europe is way less than in some other places.
I can easily say I don't use Facebook and still be connected, don't use eBay and still sell used things, refuse to use Google and still receive emails and be able to find places. There simply is no hard monopoly
The Great Firewall of China is a perfect example of what happens when Google and Facebook aren’t allowed into a country. Alternatives that the government can better control fill the gap.
It would inconvenience those who are using these Google services, but the services themselves are easily replaceable.
Google Maps can be replaced with HERE Maps, which has a similar feature set. The absence of Google Maps would also accelerate contributions to OpenStreetMap and its ecosystem.
Gmail and Google Docs have Zoho Mail and Zoho Docs as alternatives, as well as Microsoft's Outlook.com and Office 365. Nextcloud combined with Collabora Online or OnlyOffice also makes a fine FOSS substitute to Google Docs.
Any worry would be in the short term, until companies make the transition to other solutions. I agree that the absence of Facebook would also not pose long-term issues, since users would simply migrate to other social media platforms and businesses would choose other forms of advertising.
i thought that was just recent
I am fairly sure the backlash to losing Google would be significant, even government-ending.
I don’t think they’re entirely bluffing, it may be they temporarily have no choice because this is a difficult technical problem with their existing code base. How do you store a global social graph and its associated content without having data cross borders? Even more so, how do you adapt an existing complex global social graph to respect borders? And how do you get Facebook to instantly load all the content from each of these segregated data stores?
One day a cool enough new social media startup will appear, and I will sign up, I promise!
They are either unbelievably tone deaf and about to get themselves in serious trouble which feels unlikely given the amounts of money involved or they are playing some crazy chess game. Unbelievably the first feels more likely here. You'd have to assume at an organization the size of FB there are a couple of adults in the room but maybe none with enough sway to stop this slow motion train wreck?
People and especially execs at Facebook are incredibly out of touch with how their product is perceived.
I also know that the actual perception of Facebook in Europe is even worse than in the US, due to higher importance of privacy.
They think everyone loves them and would hate to see them go, to the point where they might pressure their governments, when in reality most Europeans hate Facebook and would love to see them gone. The amount of hubris and ego-driven miscalculation is insane.
s/plastics/Facebook
My FB feed is pretty equally split between English, French and German posts and comments. I know what’s up with my friends and their kids, pets, etc. I get a lot of jokes. People don’t want to lose that.
FB is also being arrogant and if they really try to pull out yes, they will provoke a lot of unhappiness directed at the EU, but I do think quite a few — probably close to majority, will be upset that FB won’t protect their data. Sadly there is no European alternative to FB/IG, and not really WhatsApp.
The EU politicians should stop them lazy sniping and attacking of FB and simply, quietly, and firmly insist that FB obey the (European) law. They would be more effective if they chose to speak softly and just keep a tight grip on the data protection stick.
For example, Sweden has two digital markets. One was bought by eBay but the other one continued until FB introduced its own market which unlike this one is "free" and doesn't even require you to leave your filter bubble and log into a different site.
If FB pulls out they will have a fighting chance to survive.
Right now, if you don't exist on facebook, it's a bad hit to your sales. However, existing on facebook requires the goodwill of... well facebook. They can wipe you out of existence in a few clicks, just by deleting your page.
It happened to me once. I was suddenly banned from posting ads on instagram. No explanation given. Then I appealed, and it was restored. Still no explanation given.
Of course I stopped paying those <insert insulting word here> pigs. But still, the situation remains: you have to be on facebook, but they can unjustly dispose of you.
Meta has a monopoly on communication channels. It's not better, it's just a monopoly. That needs to change.
[0] https://www.trendingtopics.eu/meta-withdrawal-from-europe-wo...
I like politicians with a real backbone :)
I would like to do it as a Software Engineer. Anyone wants to be in charge of the marketing?
Good that finally it's breaks trough to the mainstream.
Facebook is simply trying to score some small victory out of a bad situation, probably a time extension or somewhat relaxed rules.
The question is whether this will backfire when everyone else sees it as a real threat.
“I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook,” Le Maire added. “Digital giants must understand that the European continent will resist and affirm its sovereignty.”
The pair were responding to comments in Meta’s annual report published Thursday, warning that if it couldn’t rely on new or existing agreements to shift data, then it would “likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe.”
The European Union “is such a big internal market with so much economic power that if we act in unity we won’t be intimidated by something like this,” Habeck said.
(That's the gist of it - Meta doesn't want to comply with EU's privacy and data protection laws).