Facebook's (Meta's) Secret World Domination Plan

Almost half of the world's population uses one of Mela's services every month. Facebook and Instagram combined hold over 75 percent of the social media market share, and WhatsApp has become the world's default instant messaging app. This is the story of how Facebook took over the world.

In the early days of Facebook, it was reported that Zuckerberg ended meetings by shouting "domination," and it's safe to say that he's achieved it. To understand how, we need to rewind nearly 20 years.

[Music] Remember that old New Yorker cartoon on the internet? "Nobody knows you're a dog." But in the real world, some of the internet's most influential and successful forces have their own version of that line: "On the internet, nobody knows you're a teenager."

It's 2005. If you're in high school, or starting your last year of college, or maybe you're a young parent trying to stay in touch with friends, when you hear about a new website called Facebook, you might sign up. At the time, you had no idea you were looking at a website that would change the world as we know it. Facebook, of course, didn't invent social networking. It started in 1997 with six degrees.com, the first website to feature profiles, friends, and location services.

Then in 1999, LiveJournal came onto the scene as a way to keep in touch with friends via blogging. By 2007, it had 14 million users and was sold to a large Russian media company. Then there was Friendster in 2002 and Myspace in 2003. By 2005, Myspace was the dominant social network in the United States.

But Myspace, or any of us, didn't have any idea what was coming. In one of Harvard's dorm rooms, young Mark Zuckerberg was working on a social networking site that would soon overthrow every competitor in the market. One factor working in Facebook's favor was timing. Thanks to the rising availability of broadband, more people were on the internet in the mid-2000s than ever before, and these previous social networks helped Facebook compile a long list of technical and business mistakes to avoid.

But it certainly wasn't all luck. Zuckerberg and his co-founders built Facebook in a controlled, methodical way. It started at Harvard, then slowly expanded to other universities, high schools, and corporations. It wasn't until September of 2006, after two years of limited availability, that Facebook opened its platform to anyone 13 and over.

This slow growth allowed time to perfect the technology and allowed its founders to hire intelligent engineers who constantly added new features. Facebook quickly gained around 12 million users, and by 2008, just two years after its public release, a hundred million people were using Facebook. That same year, Sheryl Sandberg joined the company as Chief Operating Officer after working as the chief of staff for the Treasury Department in the Clinton administration.

Sandberg was viewed as the adult in the room with Zuckerberg, and from there, things really took off. By December 2009, Facebook had become the most popular social platform in the world. When the movie "The Social Network" came out in 2010, Facebook's supremacy was officially solidified in Hollywood history. But that wasn't enough for Zuckerberg, who was looking for domination.

Much of Facebook's success is thanks to its unique growth team. The company isn't just worried about getting new people to join, but is concerned with monthly active users, which indicates how often people return to the site and spend time on it. It might seem obvious these days, but in 2007, when Zuckerberg was just 23, he created a growth team that used data to generate engagement.

At the time, other companies largely considered growth to be the responsibility of the PR and marketing departments, whereas Facebook prioritized data and engineering. In the early days, people left the site because they couldn't find their friends fast enough, so the growth team created the "people you may know" function that allowed Facebook to access your contacts to suggest friends immediately.

As you might expect, this led to some privacy issues, like psychologists' patients being recommended to befriend each other. This certainly wouldn't be Facebook's last dance with privacy concerns either. That wasn't the only tool in the growth team's arsenal that came with controversy.

Tristan Harris, a computer scientist and former Google employee, co-founded the Center for Humane Technology to push back against the addictive elements of technology. All tech companies, Facebook included, have relied on people's weaknesses and addictive tendencies to gain time and attention. The perfect example is the now ubiquitous "like" button.

This kept people returning to the site for the dopamine hit they'd feel when someone liked their post. As Harris put it, the like button and everything that came with it essentially turned our smartphones into slot machines, and that's what the company wanted. Because the more addictive the platform is to its users, the more opportunity for revenue. Because, well, ads.

Facebook's advertising model didn't start off how we know it today. In the early college campus days, the site sold what it called "flyers," which were ads students could buy to promote parties and other campus activities. As the company grew, businesses flocked to Facebook to advertise because they were able to directly target audiences by college degree, type, preferred courses, age, gender, and interest.

This made Facebook's advertising far more effective than traditional print or TV advertising. By the end of 2007, a hundred thousand companies had signed up with Facebook's Business Pages, promoting themselves through advertising. Like Google ads, Facebook's advertising strategy focused on reinventing the wheel altogether by linking ads to specific and targeted users.

This idea seems so normal to us now when we merely talk about a toaster oven and suddenly it appears on our Instagram feed, but it was revolutionary then and continues to be insanely profitable for Facebook. But some might argue that the ultimate key to Facebook's status as a global behemoth is its consistent acquisition of companies.

It's used as competitors or additions to its master plan, aptly called the "copy, acquire, kill" method. In the early days of building anything, time is your most precious commodity, and we can easily fall into the trap of spending so much time on what we're working on that we don't think about other essential things, like our health.

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Back to our story. It started in 2012 when Facebook bought Instagram for one billion dollars and two years later grabbed the global messaging app WhatsApp for 19 billion, and the virtual reality company Oculus for 2 billion. When companies like Snapchat wouldn't sell to them, Facebook simply copied and integrated the app's features into their own app. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's the same thing they're trying to do to Twitter by introducing Threads—or is it X now?

Facebook's rise has been meteoric, but it came with a rocky and bumpy ride. The first sign of danger for Facebook came in 2013 when its content moderation strategy, or lack thereof, unraveled. It was found to be experimenting with its users by showing certain content to influence people's moods. Eventually, it issued an apology, but that was small potatoes compared to what would come.

The idea of fake news didn't really exist before 2015, but at the start of the 2016 U.S. election, when a study found that 63% of Americans on Facebook got their news from Facebook, the company knew it had to get ahead of the potential for misinformation. It introduced a new feature that allowed users to flag articles as false news and rolled out a program for journalists to try and favor hard-hitting journalism.

Sadly, these measures did next to nothing to stop the spread of misinformation in the 2016 election. More people engaged with fake news stories than real ones, and it was all because of the way the algorithm was designed. Fake news is sensational, and it's purposely designed to cause outrage and fear. But this also means it's more likely to be clicked on and commented on, prioritizing the story because the algorithm looks for shares and interacts with the articles they get the most interaction.

Publicly, Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook wasn't an influence in the election, but behind the scenes, it provided Congress with information that proved a Russian-based organization had run 3,000 ads between 2015 and 2016 in possible connection with election interference. The ads covering topics from race to gun rights reached 10 million U.S. citizens.

Facebook knew it was poisoning people's brains and making a ton of money off it, but it would never admit doing so publicly. I mean, who would? Perhaps that's because in 2017, riding the wave of fake news controversies, Facebook made a three billion dollar profit, a 76 percent increase over the year before. Why would they admit to anything when it wasn't hurting their earnings? If anything, the spread of misinformation increased engagements, which increased ad revenue.

If fake news wouldn't stop the rocket ship that was Facebook, perhaps privacy violations would. In March of 2018, a story broke in the New York Times and the Guardian that the personal data of up to 87 million people had been scraped by a Facebook-adjacent app called "This is Your Digital Life." People passed on personal information via the app, and the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used the info to advise right-leaning groups, like the campaigns of Donald Trump and Vote Leave, a pro-Brexit group.

This data leak brought a magnifying glass to Facebook's privacy issues like we've never seen before. As a result, the company's stock lost 60% of its value, wiping out 70 billion dollars. In response, Zuckerberg suspended Cambridge Analytica and certain apps and testified before the United States Congress. The scandal ultimately ended up with Facebook paying a 663 thousand dollar fine in the UK and was seen as a turning point around social media platforms and their access to our information.

The following year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook 5 billion dollars over user privacy violations—a record-breaking fine for a tech company—but still a small price to pay for a company that makes upwards of a hundred billion dollars yearly. Since then, Facebook's reputation has continued to plummet. In 2020, a data scientist said that the company failed to stop political manipulation by foreign governments.

In 2021, Facebook was discovered to be the central planning platform for riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. And later that year, Frances Haugen, a former employee, testified that Facebook and the companies that owned it knew they were causing harm to people but continued to put profit over the welfare of their users. Only one other industry doesn't care about the welfare of its users; it continues to sell them the things they know are harmful to them, and they also call their customers "users."

Needless to say, while still raking in the cash, Facebook needed a facelift. "It is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do, to reflect who we are and what we hope to build. I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta."

Enter Meta. Facebook announced that the parent company of the social platform and all the other companies that it had acquired would be changed to Meta. The new name could potentially leave behind the controversies plaguing Facebook because the reality is that Facebook just isn't what it used to be. A 2018 study found that 51% of people aged 13 to 17 used Facebook, a significant drop, as Facebook lost out to Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and then TikTok.

Under its new parent company Meta, Facebook has continued to flourish in emerging markets, allowing its influence to grow globally. One of the ways it does this is by enabling easy communication in parts of the world where other channels are inaccessible. For example, in much of Africa, Facebook is the internet. It's free on many African telecom networks, and users don't need phone credit to log on. Only eight percent of African households have a computer, so internet access via mobile phone is critical.

Facebook's Free Basics provides internet service that gives users credit-free access to the platform and works on low-cost mobile phones. In further expansion plans, Meta is developing satellites that can provide internet access to remote areas, mainly so residents can use Facebook. Some see this as digital colonialism, a way of turning people in the global south into consumers of Western corporate content.

It's a valid argument, but saying that Facebook is the sole culprit of this practice is naive. One can visit almost any country on the planet and order McDonald's or Starbucks. Uber currently has cars on the roads of major African cities like Lagos with a safety rating of zero, just to increase profits. As crucial as these emerging markets are for the future of Facebook's world takeover, Meta's plans are even more far-reaching, and they need to be.

Because during the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 70 percent of Meta's stock value eroded. This was partially due to Apple's introduction of an app tracking transparency feature, which allowed people to opt out of apps like Facebook and Instagram from tracking their data. This meant less targeted advertising, which meant less money for Meta. Of course, the introduction of TikTok can't be underestimated either.

So Meta is making some big bets to become even more powerful than it already is. The first could pay off. One of the keys to Facebook and Meta's domination has been eliminating competition. One of the mainstays throughout Facebook's days has been Twitter. Zuckerberg saw an opening when users soured on the app after Elon Musk bought it and upended some publicly favorable company policies.

To an overwhelming response, Meta launched Threads to compete with Twitter. In two hours, the app gained 2 million users, and by the next day, over 30 million people had signed up. It has now gone down in history as the most rapidly downloaded app ever. While Meta's leadership was pleasantly surprised by the turnout, they planned for it according to some of the most followed people on Twitter to convert to Threads, like Ellen, Bill Gates, and Oprah.

In an odd turn of events, users seemed so soured by one tech magnate that they embraced another. For many, Zuckerberg feels like the lesser of two evils; the devil you know is better than the angel you don't. Threads has been losing ground in recent weeks, although Zuckerberg insists that they're doing basic work on the app to make it function better. Once it's ready for a jolt, Meta will throw more weight behind it.

But Meta's takeover isn't dependent on a Twitter look-alike. Meta was born from the idea of creating the metaverse, a digital world accessed through virtual reality where you can socialize, workshop, and more. Facebook Spaces, a precursor to the metaverse, was a VR app that allowed participants to hang out with their friends in person while also wearing their VR headsets.

Who distributes most of the VR headsets in the world? Meta has purchased seven of the most successful VR development studios in the world and has one of Earth's largest VR content catalogs. In fact, it owns so many VR-related companies that in 2022, the FTC, an agency that protects the rights of U.S. consumers, blocked Meta from buying yet another popular VR studio, signaling that Meta's copy-acquire-kill plan might be losing one of its likes.

Regardless, Zuckerberg is staking Meta's future on the metaverse and the digital worlds it will contain. He's spoken about a future where users adopt avatars to work in virtual boardrooms, attend digital events with friends, and shop in digital stores. The final component to such immense power coming together is unsurprisingly artificial intelligence.

Like almost every other tech company, Meta has increased its focus on AI. However, Meta has differentiated itself by pledging its AI will be open source. Open source AI means that the company's code will be free to developers and software enthusiasts worldwide. Companies like Google and the not-so-aptly-named OpenAI have set limits on who can access the latest technology and control what can be done.

Zuckerberg insists that making the AI code open source will allow people to scrutinize and improve upon it. Like any AI, there is concern that Meta could be used for evil. I made a video on how AI could be a key ingredient to generating more spam, scamming, and disinformation. But Meta says that releasing the technology to the public can strengthen its ability to fight against these abuses.

Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global public policy, said, "It's not sustainable to keep this important technology in the hands of a few corporations," which coming from an executive at Meta is a bit ironic. Because even if Meta shares its AI code, it still controls so many of us in ways we'll never be able to surmount.

Copy, acquire, kill has been a mainstay of Meta's strategy. Facebook itself was ultimately just a copy of previous social networks, albeit a better one, which it eventually killed. Then over time, the company made huge acquisitions like Instagram and WhatsApp to balloon its influence and copied other successful giants like Twitter and Snapchat.

What if Meta gets all the power? Then that's called a monopoly. And if you've ever played the board game, you'd know that it's not fun when you're on the losing side. Every person except the person who has a monopoly is on the losing side. If companies can't compete with Facebook in the dock of other entities Meta owns, then Meta gets all the opportunity.

This ultimately could limit innovation, and we're already seeing it play out. Recently, there's been suspicion that Meta is selling VR headsets for dirt cheap and at a loss to drive out competitors. This is called predatory pricing, and while it's illegal, it can be complicated to prove because generally, low prices are seen as good for consumers.

Right now, Meta is too young to be called a monopoly, but if the metaverse comes to fruition and Meta owns every entity in it, this predatory behavior could become the norm. Consumers—us, the people who have been clicking, sharing, liking, and friending for all these years—might find it's too late to turn back. But what's the alternative? Leave Threads for Twitter? Facebook for Snapchat? Instagram for TikTok?

Well, certainly not the last one, because TikTok is way more dangerous than you think. The video on your screen right now tells you exactly why.