| | | | | By Jeff Brown, Editor, The Bleeding Edge | | Editor's Note: We're less than a week away from Jeff's big strategy session for the coming crypto boom… | | Next Wednesday, January 15, at 8 p.m. ET, he'll be hosting this event to help you prepare for the inauguration of America's first-ever pro-crypto president, including a small set of coins he believes could be the biggest beneficiaries of President Trump's policies. | | | | |
For years, Facebook's mission statement was "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." | | It was positioned as a magnanimous gesture. Facebook wanted us all to think that it was working hard to give everyone a voice, free expression, and an open, connected world. And it wouldn't charge us a thing for what it was giving us. | | Most people never think about how a company could afford to offer a service like that for free. And when we receive an advertisement for something that we're actually interested in, it doesn't feel like an intrusion at all. | | In fact, when it's something we're actually looking for, we may even appreciate receiving the ad. It effortlessly fulfills a current need we have. | | If we don't understand the underlying tech, read the company's SEC filings, or listen to its earnings calls, we wouldn't understand how that magic happens. | | Or what it costs. | | Facebook's Pound of Flesh | | In exchange for Facebook's "magnanimity," it takes a pound of flesh from us – in the form of the confiscation of our data. | | It watches and often listens to everything we do and say. | | That's why, when you may have discussed with a friend about how you'd love to go to the Bahamas over spring break, you're often served with ads about trips to the Bahamas. It's not freaky, it's just data surveillance, machine learning, and software. | | Alphabet (Google) operates in the same way. I never liked either company because of their business practices, but that's a subjective matter. Most people are completely unaware of how these companies disregard our privacy. And those who do understand tend to not care. The tradeoff of the free service for privacy is one that most are willing to accept. | | Despite my distaste for Facebook's business practices, as an investment analyst, objectively Facebook (Meta) is a fantastic business. | | | A New Mission | | Not long after I launched The Near Future Report – my flagship large-cap growth stock investment research publication – I recommended Facebook at $146.22. That was on October 30, 2018. | | Today the renamed company, Meta, is trading at $610.72 – up about 318%. | | Recommending Facebook at that time wasn't easy. In 2017, Facebook changed its mission to: "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." | | It may seem nuanced, but the removal of preserving and protecting people's rights to "share" and be "open" was very symbolic. | | Leading into the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook started to lean heavily into content moderation, content suppression, shadow banning, and pushing ideology on its platform. | | With every year that passed, it got worse, culminating during the pandemic when all social media platforms were pressured by the U.S. government to censor both content and individuals who didn't agree with the government's desired political narrative. | | Big tech and social media companies were complicit and largely compliant with the government's demands. While many of us knew of these violations of constitutional rights for years, the dam broke with the truth when the Twitter files were released. Congressional hearings followed, and the gory details were laid bare for all to see. | | Elon Musk cleaned up Twitter in record time, removed the clowns – called "fact-checkers" – and instituted an objective, factual community notes system, which has proven to be an outstanding solution. | | Zuckerberg, and Meta, could no longer hide. | | On August 26, 2024, Zuckerberg wrote a letter to Chairman Jordan of the U.S. House of Representatives, acknowledging… | | | In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content. | | | | I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today. | | | | In light of the presidential race at that time, it was a smart move by Zuckerberg to try to appear more neutral. He even went so far as to state that he would not be contributing to any presidential campaigns, unlike previous elections. | | Many were shocked at the implications of the letter. Zuckerberg stepped up and admitted not only what he and his company had been doing, but what the U.S. government had been doing. | | This was a calculated move by Zuckerberg, given what was happening at the time. He was getting ahead of what potentially would be a radical shift in policy. And given the outcome of the election, we can now look back and see it was a smart move. | | And this week brought an even greater about-face, which is absolutely driven by the outcome of the November election. | | Ripple Effects | In a remarkable five-minute video, which you can find here on X, Zuckerberg announces some radical and very positive changes to Meta's business practices. I assure you, it's worth the five minutes to listen to what he has to say. | | | | Source: Instagram | | Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Its global reach is hard to comprehend. | - Facebook alone has more than 3 billion monthly active users and more than 2 billion daily active users
- Facebook Messenger has 979 million monthly active users
- WhatsApp has more than 2 billion monthly active users and supports more than 100 billion messages a day
- Instagram has more than 2 billion monthly active users
| | That's why Meta's policies are so important. In the past, its platforms have been used to influence elections, censor, ban, and suppress scientific research, scientists, and politicians (including a sitting president), and impress political ideology on a global population (most heavily felt in the U.S.). | | The newfound principles and "confessions" that Zuckerberg shared are profound and represent a seismic cultural shift for the company, and perhaps for the country. | | And because of Meta's largess in the tech community, there will be ripple effects. | | Zuckerberg framed his announcements like so… | | | The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. | | | | To do that, Meta will: | - "Get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the U.S."
| | Zuckerberg went further by explaining, " The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created." | | Here are more bullets from Zuckerberg: | - "We're gonna simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to become more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far."
- "We're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now we're gonna focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations."
- "We're bringing back civic content."
- "We're gonna move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams."
| | And the real kicker: | - "We're gonna work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more."
| | Zuckerberg went further to explain… | | | Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government. | | | | And then, he said the quiet part out loud. | | A Profoundly Positive Development | | This quote from Zuckerberg is particularly telling: | | | That's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it. | | | | Whether Zuckerberg is acting purely out of self-preservation after what he and his company have done… | | Whether he himself has felt censored to share his real opinion over the last several years… | | Whether he has become based (i.e. true to oneself and one's beliefs)… | | It doesn't really matter. | | It's an apology to the American public. It's acknowledging and attempting to right a past wrong. And it's setting the record straight. | | As the CEO of Meta, this is exactly what he should have done. | | He has a fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interests of the shareholders and to protect Meta, he needed to step up, admit that what was done was wrong, and demonstrate clearly how Meta would improve. | | He even went so far as to acknowledge the success of X's approach using Community Notes to battle false information. That was the right thing to do. | | Most of the tech community is thrilled with this announcement. To Zuckerberg's point, censorship makes it difficult to innovate. Censorship and the suppression of a constitutional right – freedom of speech – decelerates advancement. It always results in suboptimal outcomes, and it leads to societal chaos and division. | | The free flow of ideas is what accelerates the advancement of society. It is the only way to solve problems quickly and get to a world of abundance. The alternative is a dystopian nightmare. | | This is a profoundly positive development… | | And yes, Meta is still an incredible business, arguably more so with these changes. This year it will generate around $187 billion in revenues at 80+% gross margins, with more than $51 billion in free cash flow. It's one of the best businesses in history. | | So who's next? | | Who has the courage to step up like Zuckerberg did? | | Alphabet (Google)… where are you? | | This is your chance. | | Jeff | | | | | | | There's something remarkable happening in the crypto markets right now… | | | | | | How will we know when artificial general intelligence has been achieved? | | | | | | It might feel funny to think about a bunch of software code having agency in a similar way that... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | To ensure our emails continue reaching your inbox, please add our email address to your address book. This editorial email containing advertisements was sent to riku221199@gmail.com because you subscribed to this service. To stop receiving these emails, click here. Brownstone Research welcomes your feedback and questions. But please note: The law prohibits us from giving personalized advice. To contact Customer Service, call toll free Domestic/International: 1-888-512-0726, Mon-Fri, 9am-7pm ET, or email us here. © 2025 Brownstone Research. All rights reserved. Any reproduction, copying, or redistribution of our content, in whole or in part, is prohibited without written permission from Brownstone Research. | | | | |
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