"Being that presents anomalies or notable deviations with respect to its species." "Excessively large or extraordinary thing in any line." "Very cruel and perverse person." Yes, and in a few other ways, defines the Royal Academy word monster. We can't deny the extraordinary and big thing about Facebook .Has the social network really turned into a monster?
More than a quarter of the global population has a profile on Facebook.If we add those of Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg's social networks add up to 4,000 million users. The world has long since He realized that not everything that shone in Silicon Valley was gold .Facebook, what have we become?
Is Facebook a monopoly?
The first thing is to define a monopoly, which varies from country to country.In the United States, until a single company controls 50% of a market, it is not called a monopoly.The European Union is somewhat stricter about it. Even so, what's wrong with being a monopoly?
"Achieving a monopoly position thanks to a superior product or a large business address is considered a reward," explains Bloomberg analyst David McLaughlin."Another very different thing is to try to maintain the monopoly illegally by eliminating competitors that threaten the domain."
Let's not go through the branches. Facebook is one of the 10 largest companies on the planet .Together with Google, it dominates half of the digital advertising investment worldwide (and does not stop growing).Only YouTube represents a threat to your social media domain (Twitter had 328 million users in June, Facebook 2,010 million).
Traditionally understood, the main problem of a monopoly is to leave little room for competition and to manage the prices of services at will.But in the case of Facebook, services are free .Why would we be worried then if Palo Alto's social network has a dominant position?
Threats against competition...and privacy?
The European Commission is serious about the competition.To show, the fine of 2.4 billion euros that Google fell for favoring its own services over those of the competition.With Facebook, however, not yet They have shown such a clear decision.
However, the German competition regulator, the Bundeskartellamt, has shown where the shots could go. Facebook bases its power on user data .As such, the German regulator understand that Facebook forces users to accept terms and conditions that few understand .How? Or you accept and give me your information, or you stay out of the largest online community that exists.Yes, without any means.
Another hot spot is WhatsApp or, rather, its merger with Facebook.The European Commission fined in May the company of Zuckerberg with 110 million euros, not for anti-competitive practices, but for breaking the rules of the Union Okay, it has nothing to do with monopoly, but with privacy.
The problem is that Facebook, when it communicated the purchase of WhatsApp in 2014, said that it would be impossible to relate the users of each service.However, a year ago, Facebook announced the possibility of linking all accounts.The issue is still in the air, but the intentions are clear: The Zuckerberg company wants its two main social networks to share data .Information of more than 3.2 billion user profiles.
Follow the money
Advertising is the fuel of the media, so it has been since its origins.Now it is also another sector where Facebook is asserting its dominant position. More than 2,000 million people are a audience too juicy to let it escape .
Thus, Facebook is the second largest company to enter advertising worldwide .With Google, control 20% of the global budget, counting all formats, billboards advertising videos online.On the Internet, both eat about 50% of the expenditure, according to data from the Zenith Media agency.
In somewhat more real numbers, this means that Facebook entered last year 26.9 billion dollars .To compare, in Spain, the same year, all the money invested in high advertising, in exchange, 14,000 million dollars, according to the last report of Infoadex.Speaking of so much pasta, it is time to discuss another of the great points of conflict with the giant of social networks.
A media medium
Data varies from country to country, from survey to survey, but about 50% of Facebook users read, view and listen to the news through the social network.Facebook, like Google, has never hidden Your intention to become a media outlet, a news aggregator platform.
Now, in 2017, it is focused on video and live television.Various news channels, especially Americans, broadcast live through the social network.In Spain, some media make live videos and even they have been able to follow matches in real time (legally, not through pirate platforms).
And where have we left the advertising? Where it was, in the hands of Facebook. The social network controls every cent that comes in the form of advertisements thanks to third-party content , for the moment, but it hardly creates anything.
The weight of the creation of texts, videos, audios and others, with the investment it requires, remains on the shoulders of digital media.Although it sounds a bit paradoxical, the media create content for Facebook (not only, others digital platforms work similarly) make money.Meanwhile, these companies lament their low profits.
The new censorship
Leaving money aside, Facebook has faced another growing problem in recent years: How do I regulate my community? How do I get 2,000 million people to behave well , don't be insulted neither be racist, nor incite hatred, nor show sexual content, nor...?
"Over the last decade, the company has developed hundreds of rules, designing elaborate distinctions about what to allow and what not, with the intention of becoming a safe place for 2 billion people," reporters Julia Angwin and Hannes Grassegger, from the ProPublica research website.
The Facebook business is in the users and, as such, the more, the better.Yes, has to be a pleasant place for everyone and at the same time ensure its presence in non-democratic countries.It is no invention, Facebook censors content.With better or worse intentions, the social network decides what content to delete and what content to allow.
Basically, the company has defined a series of categories and subcategories to be protected: sexual, religious orientation, origin, gender identity, race or ethnic group and physical or psychological disabilities.Each time it detects an attack linked to these categories, suppress that in theory.
Also content is erased with incitement to any type of violence, including terrorism.However, attacks that have to do with age, physical appearance, social class or ideology.And Facebook moderators themselves recognize that the system continually falls into contradictions .
The research report published in ProPublica notes that the Facebook anti-hate algorithm , as designed today, clearly favors certain groups of people over others .In addition, when certain power groups use the social network to issue attacks on third parties, there is hardly any censorship.It is worth checking out.
Accept my rules or pay attention to the consequences
If you don't like it the way it is, you can always leave it.It's the typical argument of discussion between cradles applied to anything unattainable, like a country or a system.The same argument could also apply to Facebook.But, if you don't like its rules, if you don't like the censorship of the content or its privacy policy, what alternative do you leave?
Almost a third of the planet is on Facebook.All your friends and family are on Facebook.Are you really going to leave it? As a company, whether you are an autonomous or a large corporation, the same thing happens.Are you willing to abandon the greatest means of communication on planet Earth? What's more, you probably don't even read the terms of service, because you know you're going to end up accepting them .
The monopoly in the traditional sense of the word now seems the least of our problems.Facebook presents notable deviations from its species.It is extraordinary, is-excessively?-large.Is it cruel and perverse? Ok, the monster thing may be too subjective, but the facts and numbers are there.
Images | iStock and Pixabay
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