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Can we talk about Zuckerberg?


Captain Ron

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3 hours ago, Dbeasy said:

I used to be in the business of content monitoring, and on one of my trips to China I had an opportunity to visit with a very bright professor at Beijing University in an informal setting. 

He had built some technology that was being used by the Chinese government to analyze and filter EVERY piece of internet and mobile traffic in the country.  It was frightening. 

Many moons ago, I worked in the web content monitoring business. Primarily, web security gateways, email filtering and DLP products.

I had some involvement with China in the past. On several occasions, I got caught tunneling web proxies through the great firewall of China. I received several notices from the PRC's Ministry of Information Industry detailing the violations. It was primarily about unfiltered internet access and the use of encryption.

The PRC doesn't want their citizens accessing information outside of China but they get really pissy about encryption. They want to be able to observe everything.

 

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11 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Wait, are you following other women in addition to Susanna Hoffs, Dana Delany, and Sela Ward?

Betray How Could You GIF by The Bachelor Australia

See, the way it works is "our alogrithm sees that you follow Susanna, Dana, and Sela....how about you check out these OTHER attractive middle-aged brunettes?"  And I say "well....this does match up with my interests...."

43 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I pride myself on having participated in a lot of various online communities going back to the BBS days, but I completely skipped AOL in its heyday, because I didn’t want to pay for it when I already had internet access. I kind of regret it.

I can go one better than that.  Got a new Packard Bell setup in the very early 90s, to start law school.  As I was setting it up, it came with various software giveaways and promos, including one on the relatively new media of CD-Rom.  It was Prodigy.  I opened it up, and read all the material with it.  And I distinctly recall the moment that I tossed it into the wastebasket next to my desk, saying out loud to myself "'Internet?'  Sounds like a scam."  I was either way wrong....or way right.

Oh, and Tik-Tok is absolute hot garbage.  It disseminates information pursuant to an algorithm that is intended to undermine the social and political order of every country other than China.

Imagine it was 1942, and there was a massive media empire in the US that was openly owned by the German National Socialists, disseminating information that was openly intended to undermine support for the US and lead to support for the Nazis.  When nation-states play around in such endeavors, shit happens.  If China doesn't want Tik-Tok banned, it should have let it be an independent enterprise, with no government interference or direction.  It hasn't done so.  There is a very good reason it hasn't done so -- because that would ignore and be contrary to the very purpose of Tik-Tok.

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6 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

I can say that AOL in Dallas in the mid to late 90's was the glory days for "dating."

Yeah, there were just so many people on AOL in the 90's and most major cities had dedicated chat rooms. It was a very target rich environment.

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My impression of Zuck is mostly informed by The Social Network.  I've obviously seen from a distance him being hauled before congress.  Other than that I have not paid significant attention to him, or social media/tech industry interpersonal/ business dynamics.  Listened to the Rogan/Zuck podcast on a long drive.  Zuck comes off as pretty plain, almost naïve , so he is either a diabolical mastermind sociopath lizard person or pretty vanilla.  Given his history probably the former.

 

I don't know the dynamics of Meta and Apples relationship but he takes some pretty hard shots at Apple in the last half hour.  He kind of parsed and muddled his way through every other discussion point in the conversation, but let rip on Apple.

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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

See, the way it works is "our alogrithm sees that you follow Susanna, Dana, and Sela....how about you check out these OTHER attractive middle-aged brunettes?"  And I say "well....this does match up with my interests...."

I can go one better than that.  Got a new Packard Bell setup in the very early 90s, to start law school.  As I was setting it up, it came with various software giveaways and promos, including one on the relatively new media of CD-Rom.  It was Prodigy.  I opened it up, and read all the material with it.  And I distinctly recall the moment that I tossed it into the wastebasket next to my desk, saying out loud to myself "'Internet?'  Sounds like a scam."  I was either way wrong....or way right.

Oh, and Tik-Tok is absolute hot garbage.  It disseminates information pursuant to an algorithm that is intended to undermine the social and political order of every country other than China.

Imagine it was 1942, and there was a massive media empire in the US that was openly owned by the German National Socialists, disseminating information that was openly intended to undermine support for the US and lead to support for the Nazis.  When nation-states play around in such endeavors, shit happens.  If China doesn't want Tik-Tok banned, it should have let it be an independent enterprise, with no government interference or direction.  It hasn't done so.  There is a very good reason it hasn't done so -- because that would ignore and be contrary to the very purpose of Tik-Tok.

A fundamental mistake I have seen on this thread is the belief that even if the CIA or U.S. controlled social media (it doesnt and won’t), then that outcome is equal in badness to the PRC controlling social media. 

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54 minutes ago, F250 said:

Yeah, there were just so many people on AOL in the 90's and most major cities had dedicated chat rooms. It was a very target rich environment.

Yep.  There weren't like a million rooms, either.  It was a pretty narrow selection or you'd just do a profile search for certain key words.

I don't even remember traditional dating sites back then but I could be wrong.  For like 5 years or something, AOL was a gold mine. 

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46 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

A fundamental mistake I have seen on this thread is the belief that even if the CIA or U.S. controlled social media (it doesnt and won’t), then that outcome is equal in badness to the PRC controlling social media. 

Other than cmonchina not sure I've seen that stance a lot. But then again I pretty much focus on my own content for my followers.

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2 hours ago, royiv said:

I propose a username change for @cmontexas to cmonchina.

Technically it'd be cmonsingapore

43 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

A fundamental mistake I have seen on this thread is the belief that even if the CIA or U.S. controlled social media (it doesnt and won’t), then that outcome is equal in badness to the PRC controlling social media. 

Hilarious considering the source 

 

Im a nobody. Why should I care about some Asians spying on my phone a half a world away? Im getting spied on by the Americans regardless. Who is more likely to break into my house in the middle of the night because they don't like a post I make on Surly? Not Singapore.

I'll fedex Xi a sample of my DNA and a copy of my credit report before I watch a goddamn instagram reel to support Zuckerberg

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12 hours ago, cmontexas said:

Both parties are fucking the American people over here. Its a hard concept for the deeply entrenched partisan mind to grasp. Do you think they are doing this to benefit or protect American citizens? When have they ever all agreed on anything? Who benefits most from TikTok going away?

Well I guess if you dont care nobody should 

 

The American people. 

 

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4 minutes ago, cmontexas said:

Technically it'd be cmonsingapore

Hilarious considering the source 

 

Im a nobody. Why should I care about some Asians spying on my phone a half a world away? Im getting spied on by the Americans regardless. Who is more likely to break into my house in the middle of the night because they don't like a post I make on Surly? Not Singapore.

I'll fedex Xi a sample of my DNA and a copy of my credit report before I watch a goddamn instagram reel to support Zuckerberg

Wait, you told me you were Mr Beast.  I'm starting to wonder if you're being a little dishonest and perhaps too pro TikTok. It seems a tad, sided too be so pro China and anti-US policy. It's almost as if you were had an agenda.

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I've been a poster on shaggy/surly/hornfans for nearly 20 years.

The only reason I'm samefagging this thread is because I do not find my POV here represented anywhere on the site.

On pretty much every other issue, posters here have expressed the opinion I have in much more effective ways, so I don't always post

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7 minutes ago, cmontexas said:

I've been a poster on shaggy/surly/hornfans for nearly 20 years.

The only reason I'm samefagging this thread is because I do not find my POV here represented anywhere on the site.

On pretty much every other issue, posters here have expressed the opinion I have in much more effective ways, so I don't always post

As you mentioned earlier, you are not very good at conveying your thoughts. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here and I disagree with the banning of TikTok.

Only a fool would think banning TikTok would create security. Foreign actors are already running rampant on American social media platforms, data brokers export beyond the U.S. borders, U.S. citizens have no ownership of their personal data and there are virtually no legal protections for U.S. user data.

The monetization of personal data in the U.S. is a cancer. Banning TikTok is like giving a cancer patient an aspirin.

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No one here has argued for massive human rights violations, an Orwellian surveillance state, open-gate intellectual property theft policies, or cozying up with nations who present a genuine threat to the civilized world.  Perhaps you should jump on those hot takes as well.  The CCP would undoubtedly appreciate it.

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16 minutes ago, cmontexas said:

I've been a poster on shaggy/surly/hornfans for nearly 20 years.

The only reason I'm samefagging this thread is because I do not find my POV here represented anywhere on the site.

On pretty much every other issue, posters here have expressed the opinion I have in much more effective ways, so I don't always post

So rather than creating some "new content" by starting a pro TikTok thread you decided to come shit in the Anti-Zuck thread. 

That tracks.

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2 minutes ago, F250 said:

As you mentioned earlier, you are not very good at conveying your thoughts. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here and I disagree with the banning of TikTok.

Only a fool would think banning TikTok would create security. Foreign actors are already running rampant on American social media platforms, data brokers export beyond the U.S. borders, U.S. citizens have no ownership of their personal data and there are virtually no legal protections for U.S. user data.

The monetization of personal data in the U.S. is a cancer. Banning TikTok is like giving a cancer patient an aspirin.

That's the funniest part, I'm not even for the TikTok ban, as I think that choice should be left to the public. Sadly they are largely way too stupid to acknowledge any issues with giving their data away or it's rampant use to fuck them in their own ass. Just like a lot of legislation that gets passed is usually the stupidity of the public that lead to them, though it not true in the case of TikTok. 

Yet CmonCCP takes issue with me about TikTok in a thread intended to shit on Zuck, Facebook and Meta.

See the stupidity note I made above for my thoughts on that reality.

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1 hour ago, F250 said:

As you mentioned earlier, you are not very good at conveying your thoughts. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here and I disagree with the banning of TikTok.

Only a fool would think banning TikTok would create security. Foreign actors are already running rampant on American social media platforms, data brokers export beyond the U.S. borders, U.S. citizens have no ownership of their personal data and there are virtually no legal protections for U.S. user data.

The monetization of personal data in the U.S. is a cancer. Banning TikTok is like giving a cancer patient an aspirin.

 

Well, we gotta start somewhere. Personally I'd start with guilloting Elon, Bezos and Fuckerberg, but I'll take what I can get. 

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Breaking news.

Mark Zuckerberg has just announced.

Meta is set to cut another 5% of its workforce.

Which comes out to be 3600 people.

And that's on top of the 21,000 job cuts already done.

Zuckerberg says the cuts are in preparation for ‘intense year’

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1 hour ago, High Plains Drifter said:

 

Well, we gotta start somewhere. Personally I'd start with guilloting Elon, Bezos and Fuckerberg, but I'll take what I can get. 

This would be a gift to Zuckerberg instead of a guillotine. Yay!

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4 hours ago, Incredulity said:

My impression of Zuck is mostly informed by The Social Network.  I've obviously seen from a distance him being hauled before congress.  Other than that I have not paid significant attention to him, or social media/tech industry interpersonal/ business dynamics.  Listened to the Rogan/Zuck podcast on a long drive.  Zuck comes off as pretty plain, almost naïve , so he is either a diabolical mastermind sociopath lizard person or pretty vanilla.  Given his history probably the former.

 

I don't know the dynamics of Meta and Apples relationship but he takes some pretty hard shots at Apple in the last half hour.  He kind of parsed and muddled his way through every other discussion point in the conversation, but let rip on Apple.

Actually I think he's both, though maybe not diabolical. And I agree the guy is absolutely naive.

So I started this thread with a lot of background knowledge of Zuckerberg, but I wanted the thread to run it's course for a bit. I've heard tons of things about him and his own interviews and in the end the guy has a 100% focus on whatever he can do to grow Meta and doesn't care the results. One story that has always stood out to me was from Filipino reporter Maria Ressa, she met Zuck at a lunch and was discussing harassment on Facebook in the Philippines

Quote

In August of 2016, investigative journalist Maria Ressa contacted Facebook with some “alarming” data: Rampant harassment and threats targeted via Facebook at people, predominantly women, in the Philippines who were critical of the “drug war” being waged by the newly elected president, Rodrigo Duterte.

“It’s targeting journalists. It’s targeting anyone who’s perceived to be critical of President Duterte ... Those attacks are heinous. It brings out the worst of human nature. [They are] very personal, criminal, actually: ‘I will kill you. I will rape you.’ I mean, I think I’ve been called every animal you can think of.”

 

...

Last year [2017], she and five other media CEOs had lunch with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s annual F8 conference.

“I said, ‘Mark, 97 percent of Filipinos on the internet are on Facebook,’” Ressa recalled. “I invited him to come to the Philippines because he had to see the impact of this. You have to understand the impact ... He was frowning while I was saying that. I said, ‘Why, why?’ He said, ‘Oh well. What are the other 3 percent doing, Maria?’”

Interviews with Frances Haugen (the Facebook whistle blower), she's talked about how Facebook knew discourse on the platform is divisive and a small change of their settings would make discourse nicer, but would potentially cost them a small fraction of revenue - NOPE.

The guy simply is all about money. Right now Facebook's share price is $594. Mark is thinking how to get it to $594.01. And he doesn't give a damn if anyone is hurt for that $0.01. Hell, Scott Galloway joked on his pod today "Zuck would fuck his own mother if it would drive up their stock price."

 

Beyond that, the guy is a fucking dweeb, but wants to be cool. Remember the year he had to make his own food? Either growing or killing it, because it was cool. At a large company event he wore a shirt that said “Aut Zuck aut nihil” Latin for “all Zuck or all nothing" because cool. Look at the picture in my first post. That perm, that shirt, that gold chain, the $900,000 watch. All trying to be cool.

And failing.

He made this, did anyone think it was cool or laugh at him?

 

He tries so damn hard to be cool, to be an Alpha, but he is nothing but a beta. 

 

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2 hours ago, Vegas64 said:

Breaking news.

Mark Zuckerberg has just announced.

Meta is set to cut another 5% of its workforce.

Which comes out to be 3600 people.

And that's on top of the 21,000 job cuts already done.

Zuckerberg says the cuts are in preparation for ‘intense year’

Some might even say… a hardcore year….

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@Captain Ron

I appreciate your post and what it immediately brought to my mind were all the various companies I worked for throughout my career.

I've always expressed that I'm a client advocate. I genuinely care about the people I've worked with at at various companies.

To greatly varying degrees, some horrifyingly bad, some just stupidly bad, all of them failed to make the clients, you know the ones who ultimately pay the bills, the first priority. To be clear, I'm not a customer is always right sort of person, I'm not and they aren't. Moreover, there are bad clients you should fire. That said, always making profitability the first priority has a horrible effect on the client experience. Yet, from Fortune 100 to VC Funded SMBs, the stake holders are never the clients, and instead it's the investors or shareholders. Idiotic decisions are made to move the stock in the right direction, even worse ones are made to appease VC shit heads. VC cares about Ebita and 90 day profitability, crossed with 30 day growth and they hire "winners" rather than leaders to do drive that goal. Client advocates with long term clients relationships for on going sustainable business is actually a negative to VC management.

I don't want to derail the thread completely but winning at the cost of anything is the problem in a broad spectrum globally right now. 

Facebook, among other corporations and silicone Valley drove the exponential growth of this aspect. Sure, it absolutely existed before but the tech craze insanely sharpened the knife that is among the largest issues in the world today. Without going full economics nerd, technology, the king driver of this behavior has been among this largest contributions to the economic divide between haves and have nots. This all said by a life long tech guy.. (edit - and a Yay! I LOVE capitalism guy, for the record. No not sarcasm. Which I believe, should make my condemnations seem that much worse.)

Edited by BurntEyes
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6 hours ago, Samson's Wig said:

No one here has argued for massive human rights violations, an Orwellian surveillance state, open-gate intellectual property theft policies, or cozying up with nations who present a genuine threat to the civilized world.  Perhaps you should jump on those hot takes as well.  The CCP would undoubtedly appreciate it.

Back in 2005 or 6 I started a thread on Hornfans complaining about marijuana being illegal. It pretty much went exactly the same as my contribution to this thread. I haven't changed my stance on marijuana. I wonder how all those posters from back then feel about it now

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42 minutes ago, cmontexas said:

Back in 2005 or 6 I started a thread on Hornfans complaining about marijuana being illegal. It pretty much went exactly the same as my contribution to this thread. I haven't changed my stance on marijuana. I wonder how all those posters from back then feel about it now

Let me draw you an analogy. You have from the word go specifically been waving the TikTok flag in this thread. Over and over again, TikTok and TikTok ONLY. You're not promotioning ANY other social media, internet freedoms or online "free press". You're not comparing it to Facebook and why its better. Only TikTok rules!!!

If in 2005 you'd started a thread on Hornfans promotioning legalization of marijuana, there would have been some that hated on it and some that supported it. Just like the ban on TikTok in this thread.

However, if you had jumped into a thread dedicated to discussing the CEO or a major pharmaceutical company and started promoting freedom of Mexican Swag Bags of weed, you'd catch a lot of animosity just like you have in this thread. 

That's what you've done. You've jumped into a very specific thread subject about a specific person and insisted upon yourself in promotion of TikTok. Not argued for internet freedom broadly, not discussed the subject of the thread in any detail, not talk broadly about promotion of social media, in fact other than flinging some poo at Zuck you haven't really even discussed any other social media.

What you've done over and over is promote TikTok. You haven't discussed the legal issues, you have discussed why so many countries governments have banned TikTok, you haven't compared the pro and cons of TikTok vs othe social media platforms. None of it.

You've spent 4 pages on a discussion about the issues of the pharmaceutical industry and a specific pharmaceutical CEO telling us why Mexican Swag Bags are so important to the freedom of US citizens.

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How is Zuckerberg even currently newsworthy if not for the tiktok ban? Because he went on Rogan trying to butch things up? 

The tiktok ban was the top story on Cobert but doesn't even have a thread here. You have made over a dozen posts arguing with me despite admitting that you dont even disagree with me. Now you write a 1000 word essay about how off topic a story about social media is in a thread about a social media douche (who at the very minimum stands to gain more than anyone from the tiktok ban)

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4 minutes ago, cmontexas said:

How is Zuckerberg even currently newsworthy if not for the tiktok ban? Because he went on Rogan trying to butch things up? 

The tiktok ban was the top story on Cobert but doesn't even have a thread here. You have made over a dozen posts arguing with me despite admitting that you dont even disagree with me. Now you write a 1000 word essay about how off topic a story about social media is in a thread about a social media douche (who at the very minimum stands to gain more than anyone from the tiktok ban)

So start a thread on the TikTok ban and stop derailing this one.

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23 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Listen up you fucking losers; TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Xitter... yeah; they're all shit.

If you are actively using any of them you fucking suck and are a big part of the problem.

There.  Done.

Y'all some hoes!

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7 hours ago, cmontexas said:

Technically it'd be cmonsingapore

Hilarious considering the source 

 

Im a nobody. Why should I care about some Asians spying on my phone a half a world away? Im getting spied on by the Americans regardless. Who is more likely to break into my house in the middle of the night because they don't like a post I make on Surly? Not Singapore.

I'll fedex Xi a sample of my DNA and a copy of my credit report before I watch a goddamn instagram reel to support Zuckerberg

media.gif.1fed236853bbd1e0112ae56957ead52a.gif

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55 minutes ago, cmontexas said:

How is Zuckerberg even currently newsworthy if not for the tiktok ban? Because he went on Rogan trying to butch things up? 

The tiktok ban was the top story on Cobert but doesn't even have a thread here. You have made over a dozen posts arguing with me despite admitting that you dont even disagree with me. Now you write a 1000 word essay about how off topic a story about social media is in a thread about a social media douche (who at the very minimum stands to gain more than anyone from the tiktok ban)

 

 

Are you serious? I would seriously challenge you in this case to produce ANY article with substantive proof that Zuckerberg has anything at all to do with the TikTok ban. I mean sure there is a lot of noise that Meta would benefit form a ban, but I am talking actual work lobbying for the ban. We are talking about a law that passed Congress in March and was signed into law in April of last year.

As far as his newsworthy-ness ...

real-nice.gif

 

First off I lead with it - the guy just made a serious change to the policies of his primary social media company with serious social ramifications. They are capitulations to the incoming FOTUS administration. That alone is very much news worthy. I has been talked about in media a lot:

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/zuckerberg-vs-democracy-facebook-meta-trump-fact-checking?utm_medium=email

Beyond that the guy is running his mouth about stuff he doesn't know much about. And yes he did it on Rogan.

And yeah, it's some incredibly dumb stuff:

image.thumb.png.d249303dad2b95d9642124b7a8bb054c.png

Sorry, but the guy is news worthy. People talk about him

 

Yes, they talk about the TikTok ban, but not here. 

 

Oh and it wasn't a 1,000 word essay, if you count the edit note, it's only 281 words.

 

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On 1/13/2025 at 11:30 AM, chainsaw said:

Meta knows this has been the trend, and probably has known for years but is deluding their investor groups, the few people dumb enough to stick around after Zuck in all his wisdom bet the farm on the metaverse.

It reminds me of Yahoo in that there will always be that base of old people who are too ornery to use something else for their daily social media. I don't think Facebook will ever fully die for that reason, but it's never going to reclaim its status as the top dog. Instagram is kind of a different story, but the lack of competent leadership is reason enough to believe its days are numbered as well.

One of the things I appreciated about Facebook in the early days was that they didn't try to overwhelm you with a bunch of banner ads, pop-ups, and everything else that Yahoo and MySpace had become kind of notorious for. I knew as soon as Facebook opened things up to the non-.edu masses it would eventually change, and sure enough the API and Cambridge Analytica bullshit happened and that was that. Enshittification is inevitable, but I believe it can be planned around and slowed down.

There needs to be an easy way for groups to leave one platform behind and regroup elsewhere.

 

Facebook is going the way of AOL.  Now it is really only a glossier version of Craigslist and a social calendar event organizing tool.  

Some of the car groups I'm in make me wonder how mant of the new users are bots.  Every introduction post starts,  "I just wanted to introduce myself and share a photo I took."

 

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There needs to be a cloakroom on Facebook, where all the political dipshittery is quarantined.   Until then it’s a festering pile of turds.   I still have an account, check it once every 3/4 months to see what bullshit I might have been tagged in. 

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29 minutes ago, TexasEd said:

Facebook is going the way of AOL.  Now it is really only a glossier version of Craigslist and a social calendar event organizing tool.  

You're gonna have to pry FB out of Mexico/Latin America's cold dead hands; they use if for fucking everything.

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11 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

I can go one better than that.  Got a new Packard Bell setup in the very early 90s, to start law school.  As I was setting it up, it came with various software giveaways and promos, including one on the relatively new media of CD-Rom.  It was Prodigy.  I opened it up, and read all the material with it.  And I distinctly recall the moment that I tossed it into the wastebasket next to my desk, saying out loud to myself "'Internet?'  Sounds like a scam."  I was either way wrong....or way right.

Prodigy (and AOL) were so innocent when you look back at them - they were just walled gardens meant to sell you a service, and they made their money from the service fees and advertisers who were doing the equivalent of a weekly grocery mailer back in the old days, before everything was micro-targeted to you in ways that would blow the minds of most Americans these days. FB, etc. give you ads based on a single web page you looked at last week, or a single purchase, but they also collate those website visits and purchases with visits and purchases you have made over the years and send you ads based on that data as well.

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10 hours ago, Incredulity said:

I don't know the dynamics of Meta and Apples relationship but he takes some pretty hard shots at Apple in the last half hour.  He kind of parsed and muddled his way through every other discussion point in the conversation, but let rip on Apple.

Apple is the current and future enemy of Facebook and Zuckerberg has made that clear many times and has lobbied against Apple politically and railed against them publicly.  I would not be surprised if he's quietly spent a lot of money on PACs that lobby Congress to look at Apple from an anti-trust/monopoly angle, but he's sure as hell made it clear to various politicians that Apple is the devil.  It started four years ago when Apple, by default, blocked Facebook from tracking Apple users' web-browsing and app-using habits, hurting FB's bottom line.

Zuckerburg just outright loathes Apple, and there are two reasons for it:

1. The most important - Apple spends a lot of resources on trying to keep Facebook and other platforms from accessing user data on iPhones, iPads, and Macs, including things like trying to make Safari more and more private and keep more and more of Safari's user-data away from Facebook, other platforms, and advertisers. There are people at Apple whose literal jobs involve keeping Facebook, etc. out of user data.  Apple already offers a built-in VPN of sorts to all Safari users on all Apple devices through the "Private Browsing Mode" feature.  Keeping that browsing data, as well as things like contact lists, text messages, etc. away from Facebook, etc. keeps a shitload of money out of Facebook's wallet.  If Google went as hard at user privacy and blocking companies like Facebook, etc. from various data/metrics of its users, Facebook, advertisers, etc. would be in a world of shit, but Google can't do that as effectively as Apple because it has its own tracking it needs to do for its advertisers.

Apple forced users to decide whether to let Facebook, etc. track their data/browsing across other websites and apps. Facebook spent tens of millions of dollars on advertising against that update, claiming it would hurt not only Facebook, but small businesses that rely on gathering user data from their browsing, purchases, etc.  Facebook even tried to organize small businesses to band together against Apple's privacy restrictions. A friend who worked at Apple said Facebook was nasty as hell privately in going after Apple over those changes.

2. Long term - Apple has $162 billion in cash.  Apple has a solid cloud infrastructure, with a lot of apps that synchronize their data across devices, and those apps include calendar apps, store/shopping apps, mapping apps, messaging apps, video game service (including matchmaking) Safari web browser, email, music, password apps, news apps, video and photo taking and organizing apps, video streaming apps, , etc., etc. If Apple wanted to, they could announce that they were creating a social media platform to be included in iCloud, that taps into their various apps, but that is focused on user privacy and that they wouldn't follow the FB model of advertising/user tracking and selling the hell out of user data.  Facebook would be in an absolute world of shit if that happened, because plenty of people would be happy with that. 

That terrifies Zuckerberg, and Google has made runs, both overtly, but also backdoor-ish, at creating its own centralized social media platform, but it never quite gets it together, whereas Apple not only has the resources, but has all of the infrastructure to do it and could hire the right people to make it work, and wouldn't half-ass it.

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