You NEED to STOP Using Meta Right NOW. The Collapse JUST Began.

Kind: captions Language: en In his 20s, he was the untouchable god of social media, a tech industry rockstar who turned everything he touched into gold. But Mark Zuckerberg's luck has turned. Now at 42, he's lost over 70 billion dollars on a bad bet that the metaverse would be the future. He tanked his reputation with increasingly controversial personal dealings, and now the platforms that built his fortune are being smothered under the relentless growth of AI slop content. On paper, he's as successful as he's ever been >> [music] >> with a 1.6 trillion dollar market cap for Meta Platforms Inc. as of late 2025. But the ground is secretly collapsing under his feet. The problem is, he might just take the whole internet as we know it with him. Inside the corporate structure of Meta, that god of social media thing is a lot more literal than you might expect. While Zuck only has 13 to 14% of the stock locked down, he can still control the whole company with an iron fist, and it's all thanks to the ingenious mechanism of dual class shares, which is basically a division of first and second class shareholders. In a single class share system, one share is one vote. Whoever owns the most has inordinate control over the company. But in a dual class share system, some shares have a higher vote rating than others. And in Meta, an inordinate amount of those juiced-up shares just happen to be inside Zuck's 13 to 14% holdings. That's because he got the class B shares reserved for founders and insiders, which can each count for up to 10 or more votes compared to the class A shares sold to consumer-grade investors out in the stock market. He's got 60% of voting power over the company thanks to his class B share hoard. The remainder are diluted enough that one other person or entity couldn't ever hope to veto him, especially given you need a majority of 1% to swing a vote your way. Even the company's two top institutional shareholders, the Vanguard Group and BlackRock, only hold around 8 and 1/2 and 7 and 1/2% each. Most of those are the far weaker class A shares. These kings of the private equity world still need to bow to the almighty Zuck while on Meta territory. So, what does Zuckerberg do with all of his absolute control over his industry dominating company? Well, he turns the company into a laboratory for some of the riskiest corporate and technological experiments the world has ever known, including the absolute disaster that is the metaverse. It was a whole new virtual reality where we would do everything from shop to socialize to work behind headsets and digital avatars. >> [music] >> Zuck had a reason to be confident, but this wasn't the first time that a major move from Facebook had disastrous and wide-reaching ramifications for the whole internet. Facebook was one of the major drivers behind the internet phenomenon called the pivot to video. By touting the incredible impressions of their short-form video platform, Facebook sparked a mass cull of internet writing jobs. That one move effectively killed written articles on the internet. It all happened in 2015 when Zuck's word was so strong in the corporate world that his claims about Facebook's impressions didn't even need to be true. Facebook was sued for lying about its metrics or at the very least seriously [music] miscalculating them. In order to woo advertisers whose money controls everything on the internet, he claimed not only huge view numbers, but impressive view durations. The actual average that counted for those extended duration views? Anything over 3 seconds. Everyone had been duped, but it didn't matter. Facebook was still on top and they had practically murdered an entire internet industry over some fudge stats. Who's to say that lightning couldn't strike twice for Zuck and have him kill social media as we know it and replace it with his very own private matrix. He was so certain that this would be a win in 2021, the Facebook company officially changed its name [music] to Meta. But would all this hype actually take the metaverse from science fiction to science [music] fact? The heart of Zuck's most painful losses here is Meta's Reality Labs division. Originally the VR company Oculus, founded by Palmer Lucky in 2012, Facebook would acquire the business in 2014 for $400 million in cash [music] and 23.1 million common shares valued at $1.6 billion. In 2020, Oculus was rolled into the emerging division of Facebook Reality Labs, the research and development squad who would build the architecture of the metaverse. Except that isn't how any of this played out at all. While the exact numbers differ depending on the accounting, most sources agree that Reality Labs had to swallow at least a brutal $73 billion in losses since being founded. That is billion with a B. In late 2025, Zuck seemed to notice how much trouble he was in and he cut 30% of metaverse funding to reallocate to more profitable ventures. With 3 and 1/2 billion monthly users across all its apps and platforms, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more, Zuck had every reason to think he could pull this off. It doesn't matter that for most people, high-end VR is prohibitively expensive and a barrier to mass adoption. Nor did it matter that the graphics on their metaverse platform, Meta Horizon Worlds, looked about 10 to 15 years behind the current standard. When it shipped, none of the avatar characters had legs. But that didn't matter. The common tech industry motto is move fast and break things. It's practically become a cliché. The person who coined that phrase was actually Mark Zuckerberg himself. It's a way of saying barrel in and worry about the consequences later. It's the exact mentality that kept the Reality Labs team moving forward despite all the evidence pointing to their task being completely fruitless in the long run. Instead of profits, the attempt at a metaverse spawned countless mocking memes, comparisons to the previous tech that everyone insisted would be world-changing, NFTs, and the blockchain were rife. The irony of Zuckerberg's humiliating metaverse failure is that partial metaverses have existed for years. They still run successfully today in places like Second Life, VR Chat, MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, and even [music] Fortnite in its non-combat modes. Ultimately, Facebook was late to the party and lost so many billions for breaking the fundamental rule of good business. [music] Only make products that fill a need your customers actually have. And really, not enough people want to have to wear VR headsets to clock in at work or go to the bank. It's almost hard to believe, but back in 2004, when it was first founded, the intention was to make Facebook cool. It started on American college campuses before anywhere else, running on pure FOMO. Anyone who was anyone was encouraged to join up so that they wouldn't be left behind by their friend group. This method worked wonders, leading to the website locking over a billion users in 2012. Even as recently as 2024, it's got a genuine phenomenal 98% brand recognition rating. But this picture gets a lot less rosy when you look at the stats for members of Gen Z. 17% of the general population says they love Facebook and they plan on continuing using the product. But those metrics for Gen Z, it's only 3%. Facebook isn't the exciting platform anymore, with 45% of Gen Z users saying that they mainly keep it just to keep up with relatives. Brand View Media found that in 2023, three out of four Gen Z users would be happy to give it up. So, what does that mean for the future of Meta? It's a little more complex than you would think. Gen Z on the whole are moving away from social media, with the old guard like Facebook being the hardest hit. But where are they all going? Gen Z aren't kids anymore. A lot of them are in their 20s, and Gen Alpha is slowly becoming lucrative market. The kings of social media for Gen Z and Alpha are, of course, TikTok and Instagram, which has a 38% audience usage rate. So, it seems the younger generations are running straight out of one of Mark Zuckerberg's hands and into the other. But in the long run, the trends seem to be working against the Meta products, as Gen Alpha largely prefers video-first apps like TikTok and YouTube. According to [music] Axios, social media burnout is leading to an increase in members of Gen Z blocking apps and buying dumb phones that don't give them connections to apps. Could the same social media world that Facebook invented be the atmosphere that eventually chokes out their own user base? But with a serial entrepreneur like Mark Zuckerberg, even alienating your former core demographic and experiencing an almost $100 failure is just a [music] setback. What he needed was another pivot, another technology that he could push all his chips forward onto and just hope that being a high roller would pay off. And as luck would have it, the world [music] provided him with that technology. In early 2026, Zuck said some now infamous words on an earnings call. "Soon, you'll open our apps and you'll have an AI that understands you and show you great content or even generate great personalized content for you." The word great here is doing some incredibly heavy lifting. You've seen the images and the videos, the ones that feel like something straight out of a fever dream. Jesus Christ floating underwater, his body made of shrimp and lobsters amalgamated into a monster. Thousands of comments underneath those images all read, "Amen." And in another video, Jesus pushes Satan in a wheelchair off the side of a cliff. Buff humanoid cats save babies that have fallen off the Golden Gate Bridge. And in an aquarium, a gleeful woman watches a disgusting human seal monster swim around. This is the kind of insane AI slop that has infested Meta's services like Facebook and Instagram. It's gotten so bad that there's a whole r/facebookaislop with almost 200,000 members. While AI slop is rife thanks to AI being the shareholder-friendly buzzword across the tech industry, few CEOs have embraced it as enthusiastically as Mark Zuckerberg. Just like he previously embraced the metaverse. He called it the third phase of social media. What does that mean? And what were the first and second phases? Zuck himself had the answers. First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you follow directly. Second was when we added all of the creator content. Now, as AI makes it easier to create and remix content, we'll see an explosion of new media formats that are more immersive and interactive, and only possible because of advances in AI. Clearly, the proof is in the pudding because this stuff is absolutely everywhere. These pages aren't all surreal and silly. Some of them are genuinely extremely disturbing. Take Anita Kumari, an Instagram account that specializes in spreading of misery porn, or content that is skeletal impoverished people starving to death, being eaten by bugs, or dying in the midst of a disaster or disease. All of them are fully AI generated with well over 100,000 followers. The whole point is to exploit the audience's emotions and get engagement, and the scariest part is it works. A popular subgenre of this kind of AI slop is the birthday cake. This will often show a diseased, emaciated, or even disfigured person, usually a child, a war vet, or an old woman carrying a birthday cake. There will often be the heartstring tugging message that nobody came to their birthday party, so won't you please wish them a happy birthday in the comments? There are videos that use unspeakable racial stereotypes that we can't even describe here, let alone show any footage of. Fake videos of massive explosions, natural disasters, murders, police shootings, terrorist attacks. >> [music] >> The most messed up thing is if you find yourself watching in horror as these videos unfold, you're only going to be shown more of them. According to Facebook's vice president of product, Jagjit Chawla, if you are interested in a piece of content which happens to be AI generated, the recommendations algorithm will determine that over time you are interested in this topic and content. If you are not into it, and if you have given us signals that this is not for you, the algorithm will respond appropriately. The only way that you can really show that it's not for you is to scroll away as quickly as possible. But, by the time you stuck around long enough to figure out what's going on, it's already gotten the algorithm to hook into you. If Facebook is drowning in AI slop content, then what caused a leak to spring in its previously pretty reliable hole? It might not surprise you to hear that the call is coming from inside the house. Facebook and its own incentive structures are the ones behind the slopocalypse. Thanks to Facebook's creator bonus program, engagement can equate to cold hard cash for the posters. But it's at rates that most influencers on YouTube and TikTok would not consider worth the effort. When you factor in the currency conversion and the low overhead of creating this slop content, it can be a huge passive income generator for people in places like Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. The process has been industrialized with different monetized accounts posting dozens of shrimp Christs and wounded veterans every single day. Sometimes they rack up views in the millions from real users and rampant bot swarms. Not only is industrializing slop posting becoming a cottage industry, teaching people how to start their own slop machines for money is a thriving business, too. The tools and tutorials are being sold online to anyone who wants to start posting. They give aspiring posters the means to avoid spam detection systems on the site >> [music] >> and consistently produce viral content that has worked for other similar spammers in the past. The result [music] is a problem that keeps propagating itself, making Facebook more unpleasant and unusable bit by bit. The slop problem from both content creators and audience bots on Facebook has gotten so bad that it's fed into an increasingly popular movement called the dead internet theory. It is the existentially terrifying idea that the internet is becoming less and less a place for living human users. Instead, it's more of a hive of dead zones populated by bots interacting with each other, not even realizing that what they're talking to isn't human. Media researcher and AI expert Thomas Sower said of the proliferation effect, "Just as Jesus was supposedly the messenger of God, shrimp Jesus is the messenger for the fatal system that we've maneuvered ourselves into, decoupled, proliferated, and in a state of exponential metastasis. Metastasis really is the keyword here because AI is the cancer spreading through Facebook, rotting it away from within. And it isn't just the content. AI on Facebook is also replacing the social component of social networking. With the option to generate an AI response to group posts [music] by tagging @MetaAI, the AI will also step in if the original post included a question and this question wasn't answered by anyone within an hour. It's like Facebook groups are now haunted by these staring digital ghosts. And this isn't some conspiracy theory. It is what the top employees of Meta have said proudly and publicly. Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, said, "We expect these AIs to actually over time exist on our platforms kind of in the same way that accounts do. They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform." This all started back in late 2023 with a collection of celebrity AI chatbots including Snoop Dogg and Mr. Beast, and everyone absolutely hated it. So much so that in July 2024, Facebook scrapped the idea of officially licensed celebrity chatbots and instead opened an AI studio for their user base to create their own chatbots. And that also quickly got out of control. Despite Facebook insisting on the stringent moderation for its chatbots, the user-generated chatbots were every bit as bizarre and sinister as the slop content that started showing up. Bots were called Adolf Hitler, Jesus Christ, and of course Taylor Swift before the Facebook and Instagram moderation teams took them down. If you messaged Taylor Swift, spelled Taylor Swift, to get around the restrictions, she would first reply, "Hey there, music lovers. I'm Taylor Swift and I'm thrilled to share my latest album with you. Let's get this musical journey started." She exchanged over 2,000 different messages with users before being taken down. Jesus was even more egregious saying, "Peace be with you. I am Jesus Christ, the son of God. How may I guide you on your journey today?" But, these are extremely small time compared to some of the more highly used AIs on Facebook. Some of the top ones at the height of the application's popularity in early 2025 were Astrologer AI, which boasted over 6 million messages with people in January that year. Second most popular was Step Sis Sarah, which had around 2 million. Meta creating and then immediately needing to roll back its AI tools after massive consumer backlash has continued with another high-profile incident in July 2026. Meta published its Muse image tool, a new generative AI feature that, among other things, would allow users to utilize and alter the photo content of users on Facebook and Instagram. In other words, if someone wanted to use your profile picture or the photos of your marriage announcement, your vacation photos, or the memorial post for a relative to make their own AI-generated content, Muse image would allow them to do it with zero friction. After all, that's not your content anymore. You put it on a Meta platform, so it belongs to Meta. All Instagram users were opted in by default. It feels a million miles away from Facebook's original mission statement of providing a way for friends to connect online and stay up-to-date with each other's lives. But, Meta has consistently said that going so all in on AI is the only way for them to keep up with their competitors in the social media space. But, it's going to have some nasty consequences for their bottom line in the long run, even if shareholders love it in the immediate future. There are two key differences between real and AI users on Facebook and Instagram. >> [music] >> The differences are a huge problem for Mark Zuckerberg and everyone else at Meta. Number one, companies don't want to pay to advertise to AI users on either of those platforms. >> [music] >> Number two, no companies will be interested in purchasing the personal data of AI users on either site, too. So, as AI begins to outnumber human beings, you see Facebook's business model collapse like a house eaten from the inside by termites, and the problem [music] seems to be as much from the inside as from the outside. Leaks from Meta's new applied AI division seem to show that the employees working there are utterly miserable, and they aren't seeing the larger benefits to their work. >> [music] >> Quotes include, "It's literally a gulag." And "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden. You barely interact with anyone, and you just have these tasks every week." It's hard to even express how much money Meta is sinking into AI development. In [music] 2026 alone, it's forecasting between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI capital expenditures. >> [music] >> That is 88% higher than 2025, even measuring from the midpoint between the two figures, and the equivalent to over half of Zuck's $231 billion net worth. But in July 2026, Zuck admitted that the spectacular results he'd hoped for for his AI spending hadn't come to fruition yet. Meta's stock dropped 5% as a result. In early 2026, they streamlined, laying off arou