En Garde in the bunker…

This will be a real tester of sorts, and I hold no sway one way or another, over right, wrong, in-between or ‘smack on point’, since like others, I’ve had my moments with Facebook over the ten years of my engagement (albeit this last one was a refreshing experience with a pleasant apology).

But just imagine there’s no Facebook (as the old John Lennon song would go) ‘it’s easy if you try’… And it all starts with this stark fact of reality – ‘Facebook traffic plunges’, which happens to be the headline of the upcoming piece from Thomas Lifson, founder, publisher and senior editor of American Thinker.

But before I get there, a few opening comments … There’s a stark reality extant in commenter hashtag ‘HansJunker’ on one of the threads which in itself is quite revealing, as in: “The hope that the Internet and social media would expand free speech have been proven wrong by the move against Alex Jones, the Ron Paul Institute, and antiwar.com by Apple, YouTube / Google, Spotify, Twitter and Facebook. Apparently these corporations are convinced that Western peoples are sufficiently in the power of The Matrix that the attack on the First Amendment will cost them no lost business or condemnation by the public.”

And the ‘kicker’: “That corporations believe that they can attack the First Amendment with no adverse consequences to themselves shows the extent to which the United States has eroded.”[end]

Like others before it, FB is / has been, a giant social fad, which has grown far beyond its real usefulness and is now (eg the old ‘MySpace’) in the de rigueur decompression phase. Even though as a corporation, FB is valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, its real value is as ephemeral as the shifting winds of popularity. Hence the expletive ‘de rigueur.’

Popular opinion seems to hold that FB will disappear at some point, but currently is finding its lower level which will inevitably, be much, much smaller than it appears to be now.

Thomas Lifson and ‘Facebook traffic plunges’…

All is not well for Facebook, according to a study from Market Intelligence Central that has been picked up by CNBC. Andy Meek of BGR.com teases out the meaning:

Facebook’s traffic hasn’t just fallen by about half since 2016, according to the study. Among the consequences of such a precipitous drop is the opening it’s given to YouTube, which the study’s data shows is about to overtake Facebook to become the second biggest site, traffic-wise, in the U.S. Which would give Google ownership of the top two spots, pushing Facebook down to number three.

CNBC describes the drop at Facebook as “severe” and goes on to round out its list this way: “The five websites receiving the most traffic in the U.S. in the last several years have been Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Amazon, in that order. However, Facebook has seen a severe decline in monthly page visits, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion in the last two years, according to the study. Although Facebook’s app traffic has grown, it is not enough to make up for that loss, the study said.”

To offset the decline, Facebook has acquired a portfolio of websites, as CNBC noted:

Facebook has other properties to depend on, such as WhatsApp and Instagram. “Yes, Facebook.com the website is down, but they think of themselves more as a portfolio of products,” said Stephen Kraus, chief of insights at SimilarWeb and author of the study.

Continue to completion of Lifson’s article right here…

That corporations believe they can attack the First Amendment at will with no adverse consequences to themselves shows the extent to which the United States (as freedom would have it) has allowed the diminution of ‘laissez faire’, which in its broadest sense is defined as “abstention by governments from interfering in the workings of the free market, and letting things take their own course, without interfering” … Facebook is just another example of how We the People’s voice has morphed from social media into ‘social-engineering media’ by constricting the voices of civility on the right. As a result, literally millions of people have drastically curtailed their use of Facebook, particularly over the past couple of years or so.

Without getting too politically-absorbed about it all, just as protests against Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are being criminalized throughout the West, so is free speech that challenges the self-serving agendas of governments and vested interests.

To which I declare ‘Caveat Emptor’ – Let the buyer beware!

With mighty apologies to Shakespeare the Bard, I couldn’t resist this line from Hamlet: “Alas, poor Yorick (Facebook!) .. I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it.”[end]

Not quite ‘R.I.P’ just yet, but the ‘bring out your dead’ cart is just about poised to swing around the next bend. MAGA!

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