Social Media Titans Are in Chaos
GoLocalProv Business Team
Social Media Titans Are in Chaos
In the past 15 years, these companies came out of nowhere to reshape media, human relationships, and politics, but in just the past few months, all three are showing signs of damage to their core business models.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST
SNAP
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel announced this week that the company, which operates the social media platform Snapchat, will reduce its staff by 20% as part of larger restructuring.
Snap has struggled financially for months. In May, Spiegel wrote in an internal memo that the company would miss its revenue goals for the second quarter of the year, according to a report in Tech Crunch.
The company grew by 11% but missed its target of 25% growth.
“Our forward-looking revenue visibility remains limited, and our current year-over-year QTD revenue growth of 8% is well below what we were expecting earlier this year,” Spiegel wrote in a company memo, which was also posted on Snap’s website. “For planning purposes we have modeled a range of outcomes, some of which assume that low revenue growth continues into next year, and we have built our 2023 plan to generate free cash flow even in a low growth scenario.”
Twitter is in a legal death fight with the world’s richest man — Elon Musk.
First, Musk and, more recently, Twitter’s former head of security are alleging that the company is misrepresenting how many of its users are actually bots.
“Lawyers for Elon Musk subpoenaed a whistle-blower who says Twitter Inc. officials didn’t know or care to find out how many of the social-media platform’s accounts were spam and robot accounts as the billionaire seeks to cancel a $44 billion buyout of the company,” reports Aljazeera.
The highly respected Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s ex-head of security, said in a whistleblower lawsuit last week that the company had “egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers and lacked concern for privacy issues. Zatko also said he raised concerns to company officials about the number of bots on the system and that those apprehensions were ignored.
But Musk and Zalko's claims about the percentage of Twitter's accounts are bots are dwarfed by a more recent accusation.
Dan Woods, Global Head of Intelligence at cybersecurity company F5, told The Australian that more than 80% of Twitter accounts "are probably bots."
"Before joining F5, he spent more than 20 years with local, state, and federal law enforcement and intelligence organizations, including the FBI as a special agent, where he investigated cyber terrorism; and the CIA as a technical operations officer, where he specialized in cyber operations," according to his bio.
Twitter has claimed only 5% of its accounts are fakes.
Meta is setting up a product organization to identify and build “possible paid features” for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, according to an internal memo sent to employees last week that was obtained by The Verge.
Meta's stock has fallen from a 52-week high of $384 a share and closed on Friday at $160 a share -- a 58% loss in value.
"The new division is Meta’s first serious foray into building paid features across its main social apps, all three of which boast billions of users. It’s being set up after Meta’s ads business was severely hurt by Apple’s ad tracking changes on iOS and a broader pullback in digital ad spending. The group, called New Monetization Experiences, will be led by Pratiti Raychoudhury, who was previously Meta’s head of research," reports The Verge.