In 17 days, Meta faces a life-changing challenge

#294: The untold stories of Meta's $20 billion acquisition spree to kill competition in social media are about to be revealed in court...

Not since the world’s media decided to pretend the Google trial wasn’t happening has there been such a loud silence from such a loud crowd.

To say I am disappointed by the convenient myopia of my former employers would be an understatement. It’s an utter failure of the industry’s reason to exist.

Kids suffer every day on Meta. Many die. Addiction is rife and misinformation is optimised and monetised in a $164.5 billion corrupted global ecosystem.

And the checks and balances of independent media are silent.

I’ll let them answer to their ever-less-loyal readers, by my view FWIW, is they’ve broken the bargain with the reader to fearlessly report the truth without fear of favour.

Luckily, a rise of masses of new media is replacing the staid and fearful mass media of the past. In a Cambrian Explosion event there will be extinctions. And just as well…

In just 17 days, Meta, the company which turned child addiction into shareholder heroin, is facing break-up.

I’ll tell you about it because almost no-one else is. This is what’s about to happen…

But before I do, welcome to dozens of new subs this week from those who still seem to give some sh*ts from Vox Media home to New York Magazine and The Verge, $1.7 billion investment giant Goldman Sachs, The Toronto Star, Digiday, more from The Trade Desk, Hearst UK, Harvard University, ad tech bible ExchangeWire, Nine Entertainment in Australia, Beasley Media with 20 million listeners across Boston, Detroit, Philly, Charlotte, North Carolina, and St Petersburg, Florida (where I got the worst sunburn of my life during the 1994 FIFA World Cup), semiconductor innovator VyperCore in the UK, ad network Zenvertising in Brasov, Romania, Australian self-serve ad platform Viztrade, and the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University, a few streets from the The South Wales Echo where I was news editor for two years.

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And a quick word to fans of the Scotch and Watch podcast. Former Bauer CEO and London Times MD Chris Duncan and I will be back live TONIGHT here on Substack discussing Google’s claim that news has zero value. Prepare for fireworks.

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But first, let’s deal with Meta.

The opening lines of the US judge’s ruling on the US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) effort to break-up Meta was damn near poetic.

“How times have changed. Not so long ago, a company called Facebook so dominated social networking that a movie charting its rise was called simply The Social Network.

“Fifteen years later, the company now called Meta argues that the market with which it was once nearly synonymous does not even exist.”

The ruling is packed with zingers, from the opening to the closing on page 92, and on a long flight I had time to read every word.

And it’s a beauty.

It’s unmissable if you use Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, or if you rely on Meta for traffic, or revenue, or used to. This tells you what you need to know.