Facebook accused of providing false data. To stand up, it announces 50 billion buybacks
Facebook has a profit problem that it tries to hide, so much so that it has deliberately censored conservative or anti-conventional media sources in the company's clumsy attempt to eliminate "disinformation". Economic Scenarios is also almost obscured, or "shadowbanned" by its algorithms.
This makes you lose readers, but much worse is the news that comes from the US on the use of social media by children, or rather the non-use, given that they use much less.
It's an issue that has caused concern among Facebook's top executives, Bloomberg says . Here is a quick breakdown of the main findings:
- The "time spent" on the platform by American teenagers has decreased by 16% on an annual basis
- Young adults spend 5% less time on the platform
- The number of teens signing up to use FB is decreasing
- People born after 2000 take longer to create their FB profiles: some even wait until they are 24 or 25 years old
- Many new accounts created by teens are duplicate or spam accounts
- Users of all ages post less
Employees seem to be worried because they don't understand why. It would come to mind that young people prefer to live sociality, not write it, and that adults have broken the boxes of politically correct censorship. Bloomberg illustrated some of these trends with a colorful chart:
When it comes to "optimization" for young adults, Facebook executives have claimed that "we don't know enough to know."
The problem here is this: the documents reveal that Facebook and its leaders are far more concerned about the growth trajectory of its global digital advertising market than they have hinted. Technically, it could be argued that the company was withholding material non-public information from its shareholders. Facebook doesn't break down user numbers by age group, and its executives refused to answer questions about the platform's growing popularity among young people. But the trend is so profound that it would be impossible to cover it, and moreover a lot had already guessed it.
Frances Haugen, the company's internal whistleblower, is using this fact as the core of a formal complaint to the SEC for deliberately hiding data by falsifying user metrics . . Haugen also handed out documents showing Facebook and Instagram are both minimizing the number of duplicate or spam accounts, allowing them to misrepresent their audience size to potential advertisers.
Facebook paid a $ 100 million fine to the SEC in 2019 after being accused of making "misleading claims" about Cambridge Analytica's use of user data. And it seems extremely likely that the latest revelations will bring FB back into the SEC's sights.
In the meantime, the company decides to resolve the issue in the most logical way for the companies without any real guidance or strategic perspective: it launches 5 0 billion buybacks, that is, the repurchase of own shares. One of the least logical actions.
Yet it would be enough to ask a group of users to find out what the real problems of social media are. Too bad the executives don't want to solve them.
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The Facebook article accused of providing false data. To stand up, it announces 50 billion buybacks from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/facebook-accusata-di-fornire-dati-falsati-per-stare-in-piedi-annuncia-50-miliardi-di-buyback/ on Tue, 26 Oct 2021 06:00:12 +0000.