The Enshittifinancial Crisis

[UpInArms]

Facebook was a huge, free platform, much like Instagram, that offered fast and easy access to everybody you knew. It acquired Instagram in 2012 to kill off a likely competitor, and over time would start making both products worse — clickbait notifications, a mandatory algorithmic feed that deliberately emotionally manipulated people and stoked political division, eventually becoming full of AI slop and videos, all so that Meta could continue to sell billions of dollars of ads a quarter. Per Kyle Chayka of the New Yorker, “Facebook’s feed, now choked with A.I.-generated garbage and short-form videos, is well into the third act of enshittification.”

The third stage is critical, in that it’s when the company also turns on its business customers. A Marketing Brew story from September of last year told the tale of multiple advertisers who found their campaigns switching to different audiences, wasting their money and getting questionable results. A New York Times story from 2021 described companies losing upwards of 70% of their revenue during a Facebook ads outage, another from 2018 described how Meta (then Facebook) deliberately hid issues with its measurement of engagement on videos from advertisers for over a year, and more recently, Meta’s ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones, in one case targeting men aged 30 to 45 with an AI-generated grandma, all without warning the advertiser.

Meta doesn’t give a shit, because investors and analysts don’t give a shit. I could say “sell-side analysts” here — the ones that are trying to get you to buy a stock — but based on every analyst report I’ve read from a major bank or hedge fund, I truly think everybody is complicit.

In November 2025, Reuters revealed that Meta projected in late 2024 that 10% of its annual revenue ($16 billion) would come from advertisements for scams or banned goods, mere weeks after Meta announced a ridiculous $27 billion data center debt package, one that used deep accountancy magic to keep it off of its balance sheet despite Meta guaranteeing the entirety of the loan.

One would think this would horrify investors for two reasons:

Meta’s business is both supporting and profiting from organized crime, and at 10% of its revenue, it’s also kind of dependent on it.

Meta is using deliberate and insidious accounting tricks to act like a data center that it is paying to build and will be the sole tenant of is somehow an “off balance sheet” operation.

One would be wrong. Morgan Stanley said a few weeks ago that it is “one of the handful of companies that can leverage its leading data, distribution and investments in AI,” and raised its target to $750, with a $1000-a-share bull case. Wedbush raised Meta’s price to $920, and Bank of America staunchly held firm at…$810. I can find no analyst commentary on Meta making sixteen billion dollars on fraud, because it doesn’t matter to them, because this is the Rot Economy, and all that matters is number go up.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/

[markodochartaigh]

1. People should know this:

"In November 2025, Reuters revealed that Meta projected in late 2024 that 10% of its annual revenue ($16 billion) would come from advertisements for scams or banned goods..."

We should also know if law enforcement is doing something about it, and if not, why not.