Why is Facebook struggling? Clearly, it’s not that the site itself is garbage, or that its parent company Meta’s pivot to the “metaverse” positions its future on a buzzword, or even that it’s racked up enough scandals that it spends more money on lobbyists than Exxon or Phillip Morris.
No, just ask the country’s foremost wannabe tech CEO Donald Trump, Donny T, the big man himself: It’s because Trump Media & Technology Group’s yet-to-be-launched hellhole of a social media network, Truth Social, is already kicking its arse. We already regret forwarding you this typically incoherent statement issued by his spokesperson on Twitter today:
Facebook’s number of daily users has plunged for the first time in Facebook history. This means people are tired of Fake News and abuse and especially tired of their political shenanigans. It could also be that people are waiting for TRUTH — the highly sophisticated platform that we look forward to opening in the not too distant future. Time to straighten out what is happening in our Country!
Facebook did report fewer daily active users for the first time in its history on Wednesday. This isn’t a great sign for the company, because not only is it a strong indication that Facebook has finally reached a point of total market saturation with diminishing opportunities for future growth, it’s reporting less revenue as it focuses on the metaverse stuff. The result was a 26% stock plunge that wiped $US232 ($322) billion off Meta’s value on Wednesday — the worst single-day performance in stock market history on an absolute basis.
Unfortunately for the Trump Technology and Media Group, Truth Social’s developers, those user losses were the biggest in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. There’s also every reason to suspect that Facebook’s diminishing returns in the U.S. and Europe have to do with the trend of younger users treating it like a quarantine zone for their parents.
We will leave it to you to decide whether teens and people from other continents are really preemptively deleting their accounts in eager anticipation of Truth Social, a site that does not exist yet, and whose most popular demographic will likely be ageing white conservatives who shoot steam out their ears whenever Fox News brings up Bette Midler.
This is a guy who thinks that AT&T dropped far-right news network OAN because it was just too popular, so whatever. That Trump is now referring to the launch date of Truth Social in increasingly vague terms (“not-too-distant future”) rather than specifics (previously it was February 21) should not surprise anyone who has been alive at any point in, say, the past four decades.
In a follow-up statement on Friday, Trump rambled about Facebook’s decision to ban the anti-vax “Freedom Convoy” truckers jamming streets in Ottawa and invited them to Truth Social. So that’s good news for the virus, we guess.
Editor’s Note: Release dates within this article are based in the U.S., but will be updated with local Australian dates as soon as we know more.