[EpochTimes] "We’re trying to give everyone their voice back and open this Internet back up. And that’s why I left Congress—because it really was the most important issue at the highest level that has to be solved, for good governance to come back to this country."
Many Americans were surprised when Devin Nunes announced he was resigning from Congress to become CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group. Now, he tells me why.
And two years after he and House Intelligence Committee staff published the watershed Nunes memo exposing FBI surveillance abuses, he shares his thoughts on recent developments in the Durham probe. 37:31 video at link
[AmericanThinker] Facebook earnings came in below expectations for the fourth quarter, and the company said numerous challenges are ahead in the first quarter.
Inflation, supply chain disruptions at advertisers and users shifting to products that "monetize at lower rates" are among the key issues the company faces.
Revenue in the first quarter will be between $27 billion and $29 billion, while analysts were looking for that number to top $30 billion.
Facebook shares tumbled more than 20% in extended trading on Wednesday after the company reported disappointing earnings, gave weak guidance and said user growth has stagnated.
For the schadenfreude-minded, it's expected to take the largest one-day loss in all U.S. corporate history, with some $200 billion likely to be wiped off the company's valuation in the course of trading today.
Heckuva job, Markie.
And yes, the key data point is that they are losing people:
Daily Active Users (DAUs): 1.93 billion vs 1.95 billion expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount
Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 2.91 billion vs 2.95 billion expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount
That's more than a million users, which marks the first time the company's user base has ever contracted. Like California, more people are leaving than coming. No new people, no new earnings growth.
Facebook's pals in Big Tech are going down, too. Seems no one is all-powerful anymore.
The company, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, blamed everyone but themselves for the company's bad news. Zuckerberg said it was the allure of TikTok, the Chinese spyware company that serves as a forum for lunatic left-wingery, and its apparently addictive quality to teenagers.
Other Facebook execs blamed those bastards at Apple, who instituted a revised iOS privacy policy that prevents Facebook from harvesting users' data without their express consent. Some analysts blamed the astroturf "whistleblower" featured on 60 Minutes and in testimony to Congress that Facebook knew that its Instagram app was bad for teenagers' self-esteem, which was old news when it came out. All of this could be at least partially true.
Other reasons might carry some water, too — that the company has grown as big as it can grow globally; that the users want something new, meaning Facebook is becoming the new MySpace; and that Facebook has built two huge new headquarters of "perfection," which, according to Parkinson's Law of Buildings, is a sign of an entity in decline.
The elephant in the room of these analyses, though, is the same one that's driving people out of California: that customers are disgusted with Facebook's politicized behavior.
Get woke, go broke. It applies even to the big boys.
In Facebook's case, that behavior has taken on approximately three pernicious forms.
One, the data-harvesting, and data-mining on users, in order to "nudge" and influence them. Plenty of people don't like that even for commercial purposes, but the fact that Facebook moved in a political direction is especially obnoxious.
Facebook has hired lots of Democrat party operatives, presumably to lobby Washington, but just as likely to manipulate Facebook's users into voting "Democrat" through the miracle of algorithms. Facebook, see, knows you better than you know yourself, based on all its data-harvesting. That doesn't sit well with many users, and as word gets out about it, some users are packing up. Read more at the link:
#1
Um, a mite bit of an overreaction.... they still have 1.93 billion users*. Despite the hoopla about Snap or TikTok, those moronic timewasters aren't going to come close to displacing FB for another decade.
* Quiz: which two rackets businesses refer to their customers as "sets"? A: illicit drug dealing and Silicon Valley social media
#3
Could be that people are starting, just starting, to realise that they are being manipulated. FB often injects items you don't like in your feed to trigger an emotional response and spend longer time viewing ads - as well as feed more information to the FB algorithms. This is on top of censoring what appears in your 'feed' to only favour what they would like.
Yesterday we floated the idea that the NYT’s lawsuit to get access docs related to Baidan Crime Family dealings in Romania (which isn’t news) might be a step toward pressuring Zhou to quit. Obviously that would be contingent on finding a plausible replacement, and that’s a huge problem given the massive unpopularity of the 2nd and 3rd in line.
Just to add a bit of fuel to this speculation …
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to conceal Zhou’s mental decline from the public—anyone who’s anyone in DC is fully aware of this. Yesterday Thomas Lifson posted a video clip of Zhou that was really stunning: If you wanted proof Biden isn't in charge of his own administration, here it is... What the video clip shows is Zhou opening up for questions—and his handlers simply override him and shut the event down, while he sits there grinning like a goof:
#1
MayZhou you Roundeyes live in interesting times
Interesting to see more and more defenestrations of the most fervent Pravda apologists for Fauxi and the official lies about lockdowns-masks-Pfizer's fail-"ivermectin doesn't work" etc.
- Zucker at CNN pushed out suddenly
- Whoopi Gold-grabber out
- Rachel Maddow stepping back
... all in one week. For no real reason that ever bothered the mandarins. What can be happening now inside the Forbidden City?
Toward the end of the meeting, in which prominent CNN journalists went hard at CNN's Kilar over Zucker’s resignation, special correspondent Jamie Gangel spoke up.
“The first calls I got this morning were from four members of the January 6 committee,who felt devastated for our democracy, because Jeff was not going to be around to make sure that CNN is able to do its job,” she said (later clarifying to colleagues that she meant to say four congresspeople, including one member of the committee).”
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[AmericanThinker] Facebook earnings came in below expectations for the fourth quarter, and the company said numerous challenges are ahead in the first quarter.
