Facebook — A Social Media Monopoly?

I haven’t actively used Facebook since I was in middle school, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t one of the most powerful tech companies in the world.

Facebook’s Strategy

When you think of Facebook, you may think it is mainly just for older people or that it is going downhill. But what many people don’t realize is that Facebook recently bought two of the largest and fastest growing social media platforms in the world, Instagram and Whatsapp. These were two of Facebook’s biggest competitors. Rather than fairly competing with them, they just decided to buy them.

According to Kara Swisher, Facebook has a “buy or bury” strategy when it comes to their competitors. This is especially true when you think about smaller platforms that have tried to enter the market, like Snapchat. Facebook itself could not compete with Snapchat, since Snapchat’s main target was young people. This didn’t stop the company from buying Instagram and copying the Snapchat story idea. At the time I actually never even processed that I transitioned from posting stories on Snapchat to posting them on Instagram. When Snapchat developed private stories, so did Instagram. This really had a negative effect on Snapchat.

Should it be allowed?

This begs the question of whether companies like Facebook should be allowed to monopolize social media and destroy anyone they perceive to be a threat. In the past year, there have even been lawsuits filed against Facebook, but it is unclear whether anything will change.

Personally, I believe that we should not continue to let Facebook “buy and bury” all of its competitors. This does not fairly allow smaller competitors to enter the market. Sinan Aral’s book talks about the Hype Machine, which is the technology trifecta of digital social networks, smartphones, and machine intelligence. I think that we need to change the Hype Machine, just like Sinan Aral Says. I’m not exactly sure how we should do it, but there are many aspects of social media that need to change, including breaking up big tech companies, fixing privacy concerns, and stopping the spread of fake news.

Maybe it is starting to change though. Tik Tok has become a major player in the last few years. I don’t believe that Facebook has found an effective way to compete with Tik Tok yet, although they have tried with Instagram Reels. If Facebook is broken up, I think it won’t have a chance when competing with the new players like Tik Tok. This is because the younger generations do not use Facebook nearly as much as apps like Instagram, Whatsapp and Tik Tok.

I’m curious to see if companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon will really get broken up and what will happen if they do. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Talk to you soon!

Caroline