For the past almost two decades, Meta, the former Facebook, has had a pretty strong hold on the social media market. Facebook has been the biggest social media for a long time and has over two billion users. This has obviously led to them making a lot of money and buy up other social medias as assets. Meta also owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. This means they own a strong market share on interpersonal communications. A lot of people use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to message and connect with each other. The issue is that when one company gets this strong of a market share, they can start to do whatever they want. It is time that Meta gets broken up.
To start I want to say I know this would be a process that takes a lot of time and there would be a lot that would have to go into this process, I am not here to talk about the logistics behind breaking up Meta, I want to talk about why they should be broken up.
The first thing you have to look at the fact that there have been multiple data breaches for Meta. When you have one company that holds all of this data for billions of people. If you split these companies up, it’s much harder to get all of this data.
It would also be good to split up who owns all these forms of communication. When one company owns all of these apps, they make the rules. If they don’t like something they can have it removed. They haven’t don’t it yet, but they could very easily make it against the rules to talk bad about Meta. Just like our government, these companies need checks and balances to make sure they don’t get too much power over a certain market.
I also just don’t trust Mark Zuckerberg to run one of the biggest virtual reality (VR) companies, Oculus. We are seeing them try to take over VR with the Metaverse, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to give Zuckerberg the reigns to this whole new medium of content.
It is dangerous how there is one company who holds so much of the market on communication, and the government really needs to look at breaking Meta up. I know that is unlikely that the government will actually do anything, but it should be talked about.
Mark Warren can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @MarkWarren1832