Investors did not take well to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that his company would no longer be concentrating on ‘news’, but rather would go back to its old ways of being more about ‘friends.’
If the premarket decline of 4% were to be sustained during market hours, the new direction of the company would have immediately be met with a loss of $23bn at current market capitalization.
<blockquote class="twitter-video" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Facebook edits feeds to bring less news, more sharing <a href="https://t.co/kyPJ0rbKPd">https://t.co/kyPJ0rbKPd</a> <a href="https://t.co/wj2KdY4PAo">pic.twitter.com/wj2KdY4PAo</a></p>— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) <a href="https://twitter.com/FoxBusiness/status/951804788118904832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 12, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Financial analysts Pivotal’s Brian Wieser responded in kind: “We can speculate that the concerns reflected in Zuckerberg’s post may very well have been driving these declines.”
In a clearly PR guided message, Mr Zuckerberg had written this morning: “I‘m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”
Translating that into normal English, it means that Facebook realizes that the fact of having been criticized for delivering fake news in the past years deserved some action, they have taken it, tried to improve it, but now realize that it might be better just to go back to their core business of being all about social interactions with friends rather than being the new New York Times. This is, of course, bad news for Facebook and Twitter, and good news for classic publishing media.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/BREAKING?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#BREAKING</a> Facebook shares sink 5.4% on news feed overhaul</p>— AFP news agency (@AFP) <a href="https://twitter.com/AFP/status/951824875588587521?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 12, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Mr John Ridding, the current chief executive of worldwide business newspaper Financial Times, stated in a reaction that his group “welcomes moves to recognize and support trusted and reliable news and analysis. But a sustainable solution to the challenges of the new information ecosystem requires further measures.”
“In particular, a viable subscription model on platforms that enables publishers to build a direct relationship with readers and to manage the terms of access to their content.”
At the time of writing, Facebook shares were down 5% already.
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Socialism loses again to the demand for truth over agenda.