Will Facebook leave Europe?
I'll tell you right away: NO. It happens that Facebook is buying back its own shares, so it has an interest in it falling in price , so it is sending out alarm signals and publishing bearish reports. Point. The purse regulator is silent. There is nothing else to say about the affair.
Having clarified this, let's try to examine the narrative behind it a little. Or rather, the one behind articles like this:
Dario d'Elia 
editorial staff 
by Raffaella Menichini 
The first thing to say is that Americans give a damn about human rights and political issues, privacy and laws . They don't even fight their own wars:
Now, in a regime like the Chinese one, we are all sure that that microphone in the car is used for Karaoke, right? After all, Orwell's Big Brother, in 1984, did just that: Karaoke. The regime of the INGSOC (or SOCING in the original version) was just that: a gigantic Karaoke festival. Everyone had a television screen in the house just to do Karaoke. And it is for this reason that we do not find any help to the Chinese regime (aceeeeeeer enemy of the USA) the fact that Tesla puts a microphone in cars.
Because the Chinese Communist regime uses microphones for karaoke.
So no, privacy has nothing to do with it. They would find a way to screw you anyway. And the newspapers would be happy to tell it around in a fancy way.
Like with Karaoke.
And when it comes to writing this, the tooth fairy is already following you. She is already horny and naked 1.3km away from you.
Having said that, we need to understand why the press gives these thugs to these criminals. To make it clear, if a car microphone in China is needed for Karaoke, then Mubarak's granddaughter is absolute truth. She was Mubarak's niece as well as in China you put microphones in your car to do Karaoke.
The truth is that the eventual disappearance of Meta's platforms would not be a disaster, if not for the newspapers to which they guarantee traffic.
It is said "the thousands of companies that have invested in Facebook targeted advertising". But in this case Facebook is just an advertising vehicle. One like many.
I mean, let's imagine that all Europeans are really addicted to Facebook. All right. Lost Facebook will take to any alternative social network. And since so many platforms that weren't social networks (such as instant messaging platforms) are structured to be (a little bit) social networks, it doesn't take long to understand what's going to happen.
In all likelihood, people will switch from Whatsapp to Telegram. And at that point advertisers will go and ask Telegram if something can't be done. But Whatsapp is not used much for advertising right now, so let's postpone it.
Who would take the place of these? Minds? Mewe? True? Ello? The list is long and there are also local antagonists. Which are small but could grow.
The problem is that these antagonists are NOT structured to send traffic to newspapers, or to collect data from newspaper clicks: they could do it, even if after seeing Facebook leave Europe (hypothetically, it is clear) they would not. But it is the big online newspapers that benefit most from the extensive tracking operation of those who read. For the industrialist, one advertiser is as good as another.
But then, what do you expect? That if Facebook closes in Europe, thousands of advertising agencies tell the customer that “we have nothing to sell them, really, do you think we are starting to grow pineapples in the big meeting room for a living. And we hired the Man of the Mountain to control them ”.
It remains Instagram. By itself it already has several substitutes like Pinterest, so it wouldn't be a drama for users to move.
I mean, have you ever talked to your children? Did you notice how long it took them to fuck everything up and go to TikTok? In your opinion, after an imaginative closure of Whatsapp, how many MINUTES will pass before word of mouth is all on Telegram, or on the cool chiattosa platform? After all they are not even using Whatsapp, for now it is very strong Discord that I see. Do you know how many nanoseconds it takes to replace Whatsapp?
And this is the point: why does a hypothetical European closure terrify everyone? Because it does NOT terrify EVERYONE. Terrify the old.
Let's face it: under the age of 18, two seconds after the closure of Facebook, Instagram and Facebook, no one will remember them anymore. They will all be passed on to something else, however unpredictable this "other" is.
From eighteen to thirty, there will be a frenzied round of word of mouth, and in a couple of days of chatting on obsolete platforms such as skype and others, they will be fine.
From thirty to forty it will take longer, but in the end the "smart" ones will be in place in less than a month and we will have the winner.
The trouble comes for those who are abusive in the modern world. All those who have always suffered the internet as a necessary evil, the commercial directors and employees who learned it the wrong way, the companies run by incompetents who found themselves in a landscape and always believed that it would never change.
I have been in the professional IT world for 27 years now. I started tweaking about ten years earlier, starting with the first SEGA SC3000, then Commodore C64, then Amiga, and so on. I have always seen everything change, with some frequency. No wonder, it doesn't cause me any stress.
But the overwhelming majority of Utonti arrived on the internet with google, facebook, instagram whatsapp. And they believed it would last forever, because "they have always been there". In reality they are lasting too long, due to the immense power they have, so in any case their disappearance is to be expected within 2-3 years.
The complete disruption of the landscape (who remembers FriendFeed? Usenet? IRC? Secondlife? Myspace?) Is the norm. The exception to the contrary is this period of stability.
But the complete distortion of the landscape is something that some people can digest, others don't. And the thing is generational.
The question "And if whatsapp goes away, what do I use?" it doesn't make any sense to digital natives. They will already be gone BEFORE Whatrapp closes. See again under Discord.
And even if it took them by surprise, they would recover in minutes. I repeat: "minutes".
If you are worried about a possible abandonment of Europe by the Meta group or you think it would be a disaster, you are not suited to the digital world.
In this world everything changes. GAFAM has already lasted too long. And they did it because the US government, through the Fed, rained money on them. And they didn't even bother them too much on a fiscal level, to say it all, letting them escape quietly.
The strange thing is not that Facebook is leaving Europe, or the market altogether. The weird thing is it's still there. But it won't last long: and if you don't believe it, it's only because you don't know that Altavista was before google. And then it was gone.
Such an event would not be the telluric upheaval that you believe: it would be because you are of the generation that is not used to seeing things change.
Come on, let's face it: you are still in shock for the digital terrestrial and for the box that needs to be changed. Let alone if you can understand a world where things normally change completely every 5 years.
The twenty years that kills.
For some reason, when radical change is expected, the generation of the stunned places it "in twenty years". When you tell them "look, soon X comes and everything changes", they place this thing in the "future", which in their mind corresponds to "in 20 years".
When the president of ABI said that in the near future fintech would replace the banks, which had to change or succumb, you thought “in twenty years”. Instead, your children use Revolut, and all the other fintechs born after that.
Today.
When they talked to you about electric cars, five years ago, you said “seee, in twenty years”. But I'm on the street now. Today.
You have in mind "the twenty years" as a unit of measurement of time. When they warn you that something is going to happen, ALWAYS think “seeee, in twenty years maybe”.
The trouble is that your twenty years have now become five years. The ECB is seriously working on a digital euro based on a cryptographic wallet. Not "in twenty years". He's working on it today.
Banks are under tremendous stress from new fintechs.
Telework? Burosaurs like Brunetta still see it as something that will be there "in twenty years", but the new companies are renting very small offices. It's already here. “Remote job” is already something that happens. It's not going to happen "in twenty years", it's happening now.
You are the ones who see the future "in twenty years". The trouble is that nowadays a market upheaval happens much more frequently.
They have deluded you, the GAFAMs. They have deluded you into living forever, or at least twenty years. And now that you hear Meta talk about leaving Europe, your legs are shaking.
Well, know one thing: GAFAM won't last twenty years yet. There is no question about that.
When I started working the big 5 were "IBM, HP, SGI, SUN, DEC". Huge companies. Solid. Robust. Consolidate. "The Big Five".
Ok. There is no more DEC. There is no more SUN. There is no more SGI. It all happened in the few years. And mind you, DEC made history.
Before there were ATARI, COMMODORE, Unisys, Olivetti, and blabla. Many have died.
I don't know which two letters will survive, from GAFAM. But they will, perhaps, be two letters. Maybe three.
The rest won't make it.
And it won't happen in twenty years. Let's talk about a few years. And now that the Fed has closed the presses, they won't last long.
But the problem is "YOU": it is YOU who have twenty years as a unit of measure. It is you who are afraid that Facebook will leave Europe. That you talk about the disaster that would happen, instead of discussing the transformation that would ensue.
The Celts thought that the sky could fall. And they thought that many events, of cosmic significance, could make it fall. Here, you are like them: you think that if Facebook left Europe, the sky would fall.
No, it won't fall.
Having said that, I repeat: it will NOT go away. The "catastrophic" news of these days is due to the fact that they are buying back the shares, and therefore they are voluntarily causing the price to collapse. And the news "we could leave Europe" is one of the things that make them fall.
Nothing more: normal market manipulation. Which would be criminal, but when you consider that spy microphones are being installed in Chinese cars "to do Karaoke", you can really believe it all.
And it is the spirit of Mubarak that brings down the shares.