Facebook Is Blocking Its Biggest Threat
By W. Samuel Hargesheimer
When using Facebook, users essentially agree to terms that allow the company to gather and share information on users to increase advertisement effectiveness. This not only means that your personal information is shared with other companies, but that Facebook also earns revenue for the advertisements on each user’s network. In exchange, users are capable of sharing content such as videos, text, and even links, and it can be shared with a very large network of friends. Now, there is a rapidly-growing social network website being mentioned and linked across many different social media platforms, but it is being banned from appearing anywhere on Facebook.
According to Facebook’s company information page, “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” and with over 1.5 billion active monthly users, the social network has proven to truly connect people on an international scale. But is it really empowering its users to freely share and connect to others when it is also suppressing any mentions of another, similar social network?
Tsu.co is a rising social network with a catch: you agree to allow the overseeing company to impose advertisements on the users, just like Facebook, except the users receive the majority of the revenue. That’s right, instead of signing away your rights to privacy and having a social media behemoth profit off of your personal data, this website allows users to actually earn the advertisement revenue from having people join “under” them and share original content that attracts views and shares. With this network, potential users must utilize a “member shortcode” that is tied to an already existing member of the network, allowing the user to create an account under the origin of the member whose shortcode was used. In other words, this website incorporates a sort of family tree of members who join, keeping track of which members existed before others in order to appropriately distribute earned revenue.
On the Tsu (pronounced “Sue”) website, the economics of the platform are simply explained: “Tsu receives 10% to maintain the platform. Half of the remaining earned revenue is paid to the user who created the content. The other half of the remaining earned revenue is distributed to the user’s network family tree.” It is pretty straightforward. Users join under already existing users, sharing their own original content or that of other users, and the revenue from resulting advertisements and partnerships is mostly shared with users, with a small portion going towards the social network company itself.
This is drastically different from Facebook’s business model, and it is enticing users to try out this new social network. In fact, so many users of Facebook have noticed this new network that Facebook has started to fully realize it is facing a potential competitor. As of September 25, if you even try to post a link or even mention “Tsu.co,” Facebook prevents your post from going through, stating that “the content you’re trying to share includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe.”
According to a CNN article on this matter, “Tsu said it had been receiving a decent amount of traffic from Facebook, averaging more than 2,534 visits a day. When that dropped to zero, Tsu appealed to Facebook, arguing that it didn’t violate Facebook’s terms of service, because it did not pay users to push content to Facebook.” Unfortunately for Tsu, Facebook has refused to lift the ban on mentioning Tsu until the social network agrees not to allow simultaneous posting on both Facebook and Tsu, which Facebook claims is spamming behavior on the part of Tsu (although you can do the exact same thing with Instagram photos or even tweets, and neither Instagram or Twitter are banned from being mentioned).
Put simply, with Facebook’s decision to completely block the mentioning of a rival social network, it is apparent that Tsu is threatening the status quo of the social network business model. Facebook went as far as blocking Tsu not only on its main website, but also on every platform owned by Facebook, including Facebook Messenger and Instagram. According to Sebastian Sobczak, the founder of Tsu, “you can type in all sorts of seedy websites, and you can get to them, but not us. We don’t exist.” Although Facebook claims that linking to Tsu.co leads to spam and is bothersome on the pages of others’ social networks, Tsu.co believes that Facebook is simply trying to bully its competition out of existence.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/05/technology/facebook-tsu/index.html
It is obvious that Facebook is afraid of this new social network going viral, and this naturally caught my attention and interest. For the sake of curiosity and experimentation, I decided to create an account and check out this new website myself. You can use my member short code (www.tsu.co/waynesamuel) to create an account and explore the website for yourself.
You be the judge: is Tsu really as intrusive and spammy as Facebook claims, or is the website’s business model just a huge threat to Facebook, leading them to suppress any mentions of Tsu?
