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> An independent body which hears disputes from social media users in the EU says Meta virtually never replies when it raises cases of people who say they have been wrongly banned from their accounts.

Yup, "victim" of exactly that here. Had a restaurant with a Facebook + Instagram page, as bunch of people find new places that way apparently, maybe 20-30% of the people we talked to found us via those properties, so hard to just give up even if you disagree, unless you're in a really great location already, which we weren't.

At one point, our Instagram page was banned, no reason provided, and impossible to reach a human, the Facebook page continued working without issues. Must have reached out and "appealed" like 10 times, eventually we gave up and the page seems to remain banned today still.

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> Had a restaurant with a Facebook + Instagram page

But this here is already a prior problem - you depend on these US companies in the first place.

The EU could easily make it free to have a homepage associated for no cost. That would be something. Everyone gets a homepage for free, say, one business per EU citizen. Why is the system screwing us over to depend on US companies here?

Do people in the EU want to see their tax money used for that purpose rather than other far more pressing needs such as healthcare? I really doubt it.

... How much tax money do you think it would actually take? I think this is a false choice.

(Not that I think it's a good suggestion, but this is a bad reason not to do it).

I think creating a social network to compete with the likes of FB is going to be a hard problem, especially with the insane network effects of existing social media. I won't pretend that the server farms will somehow be prohibitively expensive, but the marketing might be.

Especially since it might not work. Right now everyone (unfortunately) is on existing networks and if you're a business that's what matters.

I'm not convinced the healthcare side of the EU stops working while other issues are being discussed, though I believe the cookie consent banner department NEVER sleeps.

It doesn't stop working of course, but people who are already paying heroic percentages of their income to fund it are generally wary of new projects being added to the tab.

Do you have a source on EU residents paying a “heroic percentage” of their income?

Everytime I’ve gotten actual numbers from people the total tax burden has been roughly equivalent between the US and the EU, but people confuse the different buckets it comes from as the EU has taxes like VAT and the US will be split between federal,state,local,property,sales, etc

I'm not certain if it's due to the special brand of American self-reliance or if it's due to a higher efficiency of tax spending but, while no one likes paying taxes, in most places people can see the effects of their taxes and end up spending less when that spending is collectively managed than if everyone tried to do it themselves.

I don't know if you work in HR but if you compare Canada and US taxes Canadian taxes are clearly higher... but when you look at cost of hiring the multiplier companies pay to provide a given level of effective income to employees it is far lower in Canada. While the taxes we see are higher, the taxes the US invisibly foists on individuals end up adding up to a much larger number (as well as the US engaging extensively in employer-side taxation which "hides" the tax bill).

It wouldn't hurt, either, to tone down the hyperbole.

>The EU could easily make it free to have a homepage associated for no cost.

the benefit to the business is not that they have a homepage. its that facebook/instagram bring hundreds of thousands of eyes to the page that otherwise would not see it.

yes but it's also the other way around, no? _businesses pages_ bring hundreds of thousands of eyes to _facebook/instagram_ that otherwise would not see FB/IG.

We had a website, that's besides the point. You want to be where people already are, which for American tourists, will be American social media. It's not a choice between "be on social media and survive, or don't", it's "reach the audience you're trying to reach or don't", not a matter of survival.

As long as you're using it as just another bit of marketing/advertising, it seems like a no brainer. It's those companies that only exist because FB/Insta/Twit/etc exist that are really using suspect business model. Sounds to me like you're using it as designed. GP is out of balance to me.

That won't change 20-30% of their customers using Facebook/Instagram to find them.

The only way I've seen around the impenetrable US social media network effects is to isolate your people either through restricting access or naturally occurring low bilingualism.

The western world speaks English online, so the latter is unlikely to happen and the former would be a final admission that our cultural values mean nothing in practice.

> But this here is already a prior problem - you depend on these US companies in the first place.

Not really? The upstream problem is getting customers, and the concrete problem is that these humongous American advertising agencies are too big to care about customer services for their smallest clients.

Switching to a EU administrated advertising agency is not obviously better, because that's another big organisation but with even less ties to the local level. The one upside is that a EU level organisation can be legally compelled to fix problems, but even then don't expect it to happen quickly.

> Switching to a EU administrated advertising agency is not obviously better, because that's another big organisation but with even less ties to the local level.

How would an EU organization have less ties to EU businesses than a US corporation that has already demonstrated that it doesn’t care about small EU businesses?

The EU is an inter-national organisation in the sense of "between nations", this means it works almost exclusively with government agencies. This means that it currently has quite limited capability for directly interacting with companies active inside the union.

For example: the DMA was passed in 2022 and the commission took a full year to designated the first six gatekeepers, and two more years to identify two further gatekeepers. So that's the EU directly interacting with 2.5 companies per year. In comparison the EU has about 33.5 million companies.

the website would still depend on google to be found by most people.

This was true in reality yes, but not via Google-the-search-engine but Google Maps actually, most website visits were from the link on our Google Maps listing, the rest was basically either from Facebook or Instagram, almost no search engine traffic.

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