I'm a very satisfied Facebook user. Four reasons. 1. News feed. I curate my own news feed sourced by online subscriptions and posts from Facebook Friends. I'm reading from a multiplicity of sources never possible pre Facebook days. 2. Diary. I post book my own book reviews, images and narratives of travels, family events, and philosophical essays. 3. Networking. I remain in touch with people I've known all over the world on a level never conceivable before social media. On Facebook, I have eight hundred Friends and one hundred eleven followers. 4. Broadcast platform. I share essays I write and articles I have read, enjoying interactive dialogue with friends and followers on topics of interest. I also appreciate the targeted ads tailored to my preferences I get from Facebook... makes shopping much easier and highlights items of great interest of which I might not have otherwise been aware.
Facebook is receiving bad publicity these days. Conservatives, like myself, are angry at content moderation decisions that seem to go against them. De platforming President Trump is an appalling act tantamount to a tech oligarch coup. Deeply troubling. But, most of the anti Facebook brouhaha derives from complaints of liberals who say that Facebook's algorithms exacerbate violent extremism... read: their conservative opponents get too much play on Facebook. Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro often gets more daily shares on Facebook than any other pundit, liberal or conservative. So what better way to get Shapiro off Facebook than to accuse him of making extremist assertions. It is somewhat amusing that liberals lauded Obama's use of social media, including Facebook, in Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential elections. It wasn't until Trump also successfully used Facebook in his own 2016 campaign that liberals started complaining about Facebook iniquity. Zuckerberg seems to be between a rock and a hard place. He has both liberals and conservatives coming at him. But for his de-platforming Trump, I think Zuckerberg has done a pretty good job in protecting conservative thought (free speech) circulating on Facebook, particularly when you consider the rabid liberalism which pervades Silicon Valley and Facebook employees.
Washington meddling, either anti-trust, or regulations restraining so-called extremist speech, represent less of a problem for Meta than the slowdown in new customer growth and the rise of new competitors like Tik Tok. Facebook should go back to basics and advertise its benefits along the lines of the things I like about Facebook, cited above. Don't apologize. Celebrate your virtues. Maybe the Meta feint is part of that.