Connecting No One

Nick Heer writing about Meta prevailing in the U.S. antitrust case:

Meta is now fully an entertainment company

There is a lot to dig into regarding the legal ruling, but this single line struck me as the perfect summary of where we are. The facade is gone. Meta isn't about connecting people. It stopped being about that a long time ago.

I wrote about hating Instagram because it refuses to show me the people I actually follow. This ruling just confirms why. They are not in the business of social networking. They are in the business of keeping you on the site by any means necessary.

We are seeing the result of this shift in real-time. It explains why they are pumping AI slop into our feeds. Connecting you with your aunt doesn't keep you scrolling for three hours. Mindless video clips and rage-bait do.

Zuckerberg told us this himself recently. He wants AI bots to create content for you to interact with. The human element is just a friction point they are trying to remove. The courts might say they aren't a monopoly on social networking, and perhaps they are right but they aren't doing social networking anymore. They are just fighting TikTok for your empty stares.