Matisyahu's Blog

As most of you probably already know, Meta are launching Instagram Threads and along with that launch comes the detractors (with good reason mind you) but I think it is also important to remind ourselves of a few things:

a) Turning a large corporation takes time so even if you are sceptical that they’re going to change one also must remember that it takes time for a corporation to change directions. A good example of that would be Intel and the move from Pentium 4 to the Core based architecture which didn’t hit the mainstream until 2006 for the desktop. In the case of Meta, add the complexity of oversight by both the FTC in the United States along with various agencies in the European Union, it is understandable

b) Taking what someone says flippantly in their teens or early 20s is hardly representative of where one is in that moment. There is the infamous quote of Mark Zuckerberg when he was 19 years old – colour me surprised that maybe in 20 years later he has changed because he has matured and realised the responsibility the he has inherited when it moved beyond just a little rinky-dink website for his classmates at university. I’d hazard to guess that many of us have made off handed remarks which, on reflection, we’d cringe that we had said it in the first place was made public.

c) Unlike Twitter, Meta is still part of the European Union agreement to stamp out disinformation online and Christchurch Call but Twitter is only a signed up supporter of the Christchurch Call, one really has to wonder as to the sincerity of Twitter when they are in one but not the other. Will Meta or any other organisation involved in both of said organisations get it right all the time? nope, they’ll make mistakes because shocker, corporations are filled with humans and humans are fallible, they make mistakes – the question is whether there is malicious intent and how they respond when they fall short of what is required of the organisation in terms of protecting user privacy, dealing with extremist content etc.

d) CEOs of large corporations talk to politicians of all stripes because part of running a large organisation is maintaining a good relationship with the ‘powers that be’. Just because an executive is speaking to a politician does not necessarily mean that they’re ‘in the bag’ for that politician.

e) What is reported on what is taking place within an organisation on many occasions does not accurately give all the nuances regarding how it happened in the first place. I’ve worked in organisations where the media will report one thing and having been privy to what is going internally the report paints what took place being the result of menevelency rather than just a run of the mill cock up. Remember the old saying “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” or sometimes it is a matter of a company getting legal guidance from counsel, they believe they’ve interpreted the law correctly but then later find out that there is more to it than what they expected – see the anti-moneylaundrying laws which required on going conversations between the Department of Internal Affairs and businesses impacted by the legislation regarding whether the safeguards meet their legal obligations. Some companies didn’t confirm not because they were being menevelant but because they genuinely believed that they were in compliance with the law.

I think it is important when reading the above points that I’m not defending Meta but rather it is important to understand the motivations and incentives in place, to understand that corporations don’t have a ‘will’ of their own but instead decisions being made ‘by the corporation’ are made by people who believe they’re trying to strike the right balance between the various stakeholders. This is where Instagram Threads is going to have leg up – the sort of amateurish way in which Elon Musk is running Twitter doesn’t cut the mustard particularly when social media is a way in which businesses develop relationships with potential customers while retaining existing customers through brand engagement. If your platform is overrun with crypto bros, alt right ‘influencers’ and the like then don’t be surprised that brands decide that the platform’s toxicity isn’t something you want being associated with your brand. Toxic people exist on every platform, the question is whether you allow them to over run the platform or whether you regularly push back so that they’re the exception rather than the rule.

Just to round up the blog post, here is a good article over on The Verge regarding Instagram Thread (link).

And one more thing, I always love it when financial experts making claims then those claims crash and burn such as this one (link) “According to Insider, McKinsey claimed that the Metaverse would bring businesses $5 trillion in value. Citi valued it at no less than $13 trillion.” which reminds me of of the claims regarding the Intel Itanium taking over the markets, that by this time the the market would be worth billions, that it would destroy the UNIX rivals etc. etc. and what happened many years later? none of that came to fruition. It truly is amazing that there are people out there who pay these organisations whose reliability is worse than mine – but at least when I put out my opinions I don’t charge a fortune for them, they’re free of charge.