Facebook – Social Media Dominance and Downfall

The Dominance

When people think of Facebook as a company, they mostly think of it synonymously with Facebook the social network. However, Facebook Inc. is much more than that, as today’s chart nicely illustrates. With WhatsApp, Instagram and of course the namesake Facebook and Messenger, the company owns four of the world’s largest social media / messaging services. Facebook alone is used by almost 2.5 billion people per month, while WhatsApp counts 2 billion monthly users and Messenger also has surpassed the billion-user mark. According to company data aggregated by DataReportal, Tencent, the Chinese company behind WeChat, Qzone and messenger QQ also boasts almost 2.5 billion users in total, but it still doesn’t come close to matching Facebook’s global footprint.

The Downfall

Advertisements for hundreds of brands are due to disappear from Facebook and Instagram on Wednesday, as a wide-ranging ad boycott against the world’s largest social media company is taking effect.

Last week, the Anti-Defamation League along with several civil rights groups had launched the campaign “Stop Hate for Profit”, asking advertisers to pause their spending on Facebook and Instagram in the month of July in protest of the company’s lackluster response to hate speech and other defamatory content across its platforms.

“What are they doing with $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in profit?” the initiative asked in an open letter last week, only to deliver the answer right away: “Their hate speech, incitement, and misinformation policies are inequitable. Their harassment victim services are inadequate. Their advertising placement’s proximity to hateful content is haphazard. And their “civil rights” audit transparency reports aren’t helpful to the civil rights community.”