The 420 ways inhaling Donald Trump’s rhetorical will destroy America…
There, now that I have your attention let’s see what happens.
Debarghya Das goes by, “Deedy,” makes tech investments for a $1B venture fund, and has out-sized audiences on Twitter and LinkedIn. On April 1st, he posted this to Twitter, “This is shocking. Facebook gave Netflix all your private messages on Messenger in exchange for all your watch history, while Netflix paid them $100M+ for ads.”
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His followers took the pretty damning indictment and ran with it, “Meta will sell your data at a heartbeat for profit.” I don’t have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp and even I felt violated.
There’s a lot of dirt coming out about the games social media (companies) play.
One car changing a flat on the side of the highway is dog bites man stuff. You zip by without a second thought. This was turning into the kind of 72-car pileup you can’t help but notice.
A few days earlier I saw this moribund post on LinkedIn about Twitter, “It's kind of hard to attract creators to a platform that's in the process of being abandoned by both its users and advertisers.” My emphasis. Post from Simon Owens. Simon is a media industry blogger with nearly 60,000 followers on LinkedIn. 14,000 people read his industry newsletter on Substack. Trust me, those are big, BIG numbers.
I can’t see who subscribes to his newsletter and LinkedIn only shows me our nine common connections. Our common folks aren’t so common. They’re people who run or develop strategies for media companies. That tells me start people value what Simon says.
Simon’s post referred to a story from the Wall Street Journal. “Elon Musk’s X Needs Creators, but They Don’t Need X.” Ouch.
This all happened at the same time that California’s Fourth District Court – the Northern one – tossed out X’s lawsuit against a group that said Elon Musk’s promoted hate speech. If you get the NY Times, you may have read about this. Oh, and advertisers are suing Meta $7B for inflating traffic. And, all of this is in top of four Canadian school boards suing Meta for marketing an addictive product to kids.
If this were a news round-up newsletter, we’d be done here. But this is not a news round-up newsletter. It’s a story thingy. So, let’s tell the story.
Deedy’s tweet was about a debunked story from 2011. And, it categorically DIDN’T happen. Andy Stone who’s Communications Director at Facebook flat out said so. “Shockingly untrue. Meta didn’t share people’s private messages with Netflix. The agreement allowed people to message their friends on Facebook about what they were watching on Netflix, directly from the Netflix app. Such agreements are commonplace in the industry.” The people who know this story lined up behind Andy.
Simon’s point about Twitter losing users and advertisers... made up out of thin air. It’s not in the Wall Street Journal story. In fact, it is entirely contrary to all of Twitter’s published usage data. Time spent on the site in January was up 13% compared to January 2023. Anecdotally, I can see more ads on Twitter and more “real” ads from brands I’ve heard of. So, Simon’s conjecture is pretty much bunk.
The Court that tossed out Twitter’s suit… never said Twitter was wrong. Never weighed in on the methods. Never questioned how the organization got data outside Twitter’s terms of service. Never evaluated lost revneue. The Court just said SLAPP laws give the organization a free speech right to publish anything.
Meta getting sued for overstating reach is a complex and interesting story. The headline was, “Facebook and Instagram's Potential Reach metric inflates viewership figures by up to 400%, according to a lawsuit.” The story including the word, “Bots,” sprayed lighter fluid on the worrisome flames. Details in the same story that no one is going to read (tl;dr) said the inflated traffic numbers ranged from Facebook’s estimate of 10% to advertisers saying it was at least, 33%. That’s a long way to 400%.
Meta said the reach metric is “meaningless,” because, “advertisers mostly pay based on performance metrics.” It’s like saying buying a Subaru with a sticker that says, “Gets 30 miles per gallon, highway,” and complaining because the salesperson told you, “It’s good in the rain because the wipers go a million miles per hour.” That’s not quite right. But, there’s a big difference between what you pay for and the tangential things salespeople say.
It’s not just big stuff. It’s small stuff. It’s all stuff. On various websites, there was story about a guy named Norby Williamson. OUT OF ESPN AFTER 40 YEARS. I asked someone who was there – almost from day one – what he thought of Norby and about the 48-point headline that covered the story that quoted TV journalist and former ESPN anchor, Keith Olbermann. “I left ESPN in 1988 and never to my memory ever heard of this guy.”
I don’t know if basic research is out the window or if reporters just make things up.
Which brings me all the way back to my 420 comment and Trump. There’s a big difference between the headlines people will use to bring you in and the real story.
Let’s clean up the dirt.