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You NEED to STOP Using Meta Right NOW. The Collapse JUST Began.
You NEED to STOP Using Meta Right NOW. The Collapse JUST Began.
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Legendas (284)
0:00
In his 20s, he was the untouchable God of social media,
0:03
a tech industry rockstar who turned everything he touched into gold.
0:06
But Mark Zuckerberg’s luck has turned.
0:08
Now 42, he lost over $70 billion dollars on a bad bet that the Metaverse would be
0:13
the future. He’s tanked his reputation with increasingly controversial personal dealings,
0:18
and now, the platforms that built his fortune are being smothered
0:21
under the relentless growth of AI slop content.
0:24
On paper, he’s as successful as he’s ever been, with a $1.6 trillion market cap for
0:29
Meta Platforms Inc. as of late 2025, but the ground is secretly collapsing under his feet.
0:35
The problem is… he might just take the whole internet as we know it with him.
0:39
Inside the corporate structure of Meta, that “God of social media” thing is a lot more literal than
0:44
you might expect. While Zuck only has 13% to 14% of the stock locked down, he can still control the
0:50
whole company with an iron fist. It’s all thanks to the ingenious mechanism of Dual-Class Shares,
0:55
which is basically a division of first and second class shareholders. In a single class
0:59
share system, one share is one vote, whoever owns the most has inordinate control over the company.
1:05
But in a Dual-Class Share system, some shares have a higher vote rating and others.And in Meta, an
1:10
inordinate amount of those juiced up shares just happened to be inside Zuck’s 13% to 14% holdings.
1:17
That’s because he’s got the Class B shares, reserved for founders and insiders, which can
1:21
each count for up to 10 or more votes compared to the Class A shares, sold to consumer grade
1:26
investors out on the stock market. He’s got 60% percent voting power over the company thanks to
1:32
his Class B share hoard. The remainder are diluted enough that one other person or entity couldn’t
1:37
ever hope to veto him, especially given you only need a majority of 1% to swing a vote your way.
1:43
Even the company’s 2 top institutional shareholders, the Vanguard Group and BlackRock,
1:48
only hold around 8.5% and 7.5% each. Most of those are the far weaker Class A shares. These
1:55
kings of the private equity world still need to bow to the almighty Zuck while on Meta territory.
2:00
So, what does Zuckerberg do with his absolute control over his
2:04
industry-dominating company? Well, he turns his company into a laboratory for some of the
2:09
riskiest corporate and technological experiments the world has ever known…
2:12
Including the absolute disaster that is “The Metaverse”.
2:16
It was a whole new virtual reality where we’d do everything from shop
2:20
to socialize to work behind headsets and digital avatars. Zuck had a reason to be
2:25
confident. But this wasn’t the first time that a major move from Facebook
2:29
had disastrous and wide-reaching ramifications for the whole internet.
2:33
Facebook was one of the major drivers behind the internet phenomenon called
2:36
“Pivot to Video”. By touting the incredible impressions of their short form video platform,
2:41
Facebook sparked a mass cull of internet writing jobs. That one move effectively killed written
2:47
articles on the internet. It all happened in 2015, when Zuck’s word was so strong in the corporate
2:52
world that his claims about Facebook’s impressions didn’t even need to be true.
2:56
Facebook was sued for lying about its metrics, or at the very least,
3:00
seriously miscalculating them. In order to woo advertisers, whose money controls
3:04
everything on the internet, he claimed not only huge view numbers but impressive
3:08
view durations. The actual average they counted for these extended duration views?
3:13
Anything over 3 seconds.
3:16
Everyone had been duped… but it didn’t matter.
3:18
Facebook was still on top and they’d practically murdered an
3:21
entire internet industry over some fudged stats.
3:24
Who’s to say that lightning couldn’t strike twice for Zuck, and have him kill social media
3:29
as we know it and replace it with his very own private Matrix? He was so certain that
3:33
this would be a win that in 2021, the Facebook Company officially changed its name to Meta.
3:38
But would all this hype actually take the Metaverse from science fiction to science fact?
3:43
The heart of Zuck’s most painful losses here is Meta’s “Reality Labs” division. Originally the VR
3:48
company “Oculus” founded by Palmer Luckey in 2012, Facebook would acquire the business in 2014 for
3:54
$400 million in cash and 23.1 million common shares, valued at $1.6 billion. In 2020,
4:03
Oculus was rolled into the emerging division of Facebook Reality Labs,
4:06
the research and development squad who would build the architecture of the Metaverse.
4:10
Except that isn’t how any of this played out at all.
4:14
While exact numbers differ depending on the accounting, most sources agree that the Reality
4:18
Labs have had to swallow at least a brutal $73 billion in losses since being founded. That’s
4:24
“Billion”, with a “B.” In late 2025, Zuck seemed to notice how much trouble he was in,
4:29
and cut 30% of Metaverse funding to reallocate to more profitable ventures.
4:34
With 3.5 billion monthly users across all of its apps and platforms - Facebook, Instagram,
4:38
WhatsApp, and more - Zuck had every reason to think he could pull this off. It doesn’t matter
4:43
that for most people, high-end VR is prohibitively expensive and a barrier to mass adoption. Nor did
4:49
it matter that the graphics on their Metaverse platform, “Meta Horizon Worlds”, looked about 10
4:54
to 15 years behind the current standard. When it shipped, none of the avatar characters had legs.
5:00
But that didn’t matter.
5:01
The common tech industry motto is “move fast and break things”, it’s practically become a cliche.
5:06
The person who coined the phrase was actually Mark Zuckerberg himself. It’s a way of saying,
5:11
“Barrel in and worry about the consequences later”. It’s the exact mentality that kept
5:15
the Reality Labs team moving forward despite all the evidence pointing to
5:18
their task being completely fruitless in the long run. Instead of profits, the attempt at
5:23
a Metaverse spawned countless mocking memes. Comparisons to the previous tech that everyone
5:27
insisted would be world-changing, NFTs and the Blockchain, were rife.
5:32
The irony of Zuckerberg’s humiliating Metaverse failure is that partial metaverses have existed
5:36
for years. They still run successfully today in places like Second Life, VR Chat,
5:41
MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, and even Fortnite in its non-combat modes. Ultimately,
5:47
Facebook was late to the party, and lost so many billions for breaking the fundamental rule
5:51
of good business: Only make products that fill a need your customers actually have.
5:57
And really, not enough people want to have
5:59
to wear a VR headset to clock in at work or go to the bank.
6:03
It’s almost hard to believe but back in 2004, when it was first founded, the intention was to make
6:08
Facebook “cool.” It started on American college campuses before anywhere else, running on pure
6:14
FOMO. Anyone who was anyone was encouraged to join up so they wouldn’t be left behind by their friend
6:19
group. This method worked wonders, leading to the website logging over a billion users in 2012. Even
6:25
as recently as 2024, it’s got a genuinely phenomenal 98% brand recognition rating.
6:31
But this picture gets a lot less rosy when you look at the stats for members of Gen Z. 17% of
6:37
the general population says they love Facebook and plan on continuing using the product,
6:42
but on these metrics for Gen Z, it’s only 3%. Facebook isn’t the exciting platform anymore,
6:48
with 45% of Gen Z users saying that they mainly keep it just to keep up with relatives.
6:53
BrandVue Media found that in 2023, 3 out of 4 Gen Z users would be happy to give it up.
6:59
So, what does this mean for the future of Meta?
7:01
It’s a little more complex than you think. Gen Z on the whole are moving away from social media,
7:06
with the old guards like Facebook being the hardest hit. But where are they all
7:11
going? Gen Z aren’t kids anymore, a lot of them are in their 20's,
7:14
and Gen Alpha is slowly becoming the most lucrative market. The kings of social media
7:18
for Gen Z and Alpha are, of course, TikTok… and Instagram, which has a 38% audience usage rate.
7:25
So it seems the younger generations are running straight out of one of
7:28
Mark Zuckerberg’s hands… and into the other.
7:31
But in the long run, the trends seem to be working against the Meta Products,
7:34
as Gen Alpha largely prefers video-first apps like TikTok and YouTube. According to Axios,
7:39
social media burnout is leading to an increase in members of Gen Z blocking apps and buying
7:45
“dumbphones” that don’t give them connections to apps. Could the same social media world that
7:49
Facebook invented be the atmosphere that eventually chokes out their own user base?
7:54
But with a serial entrepreneur like Mark Zuckerberg, even alienating your
7:58
former core demo and experiencing an almost $100 billion failure is just
8:03
a setback. What he needed was another pivot, another technology that he could
8:07
push all his chips forward onto and hope that being a high roller would pay off.
8:12
And as luck would have it, the world provided him with that technology.
8:15
In early 2026, Zuck said some now infamous words on an earnings call:
8:20
“Soon, you'll open our apps, and you'll have an AI that understands you, and…
8:24
show you great content or even generate great personalized content for you.”
8:28
The word “Great” here is doing some incredibly heavy lifting.
8:33
You’ve seen the images and videos, the ones that feel like something straight out of a fever dream:
8:38
Jesus Christ floating underwater, his body made of shrimps and lobsters amalgamated into a monster.
8:44
Thousands of comments underneath these images all read “Amen.” In another video,
8:49
Jesus pushes Satan in a wheelchair off of the side of a cliff. Buff humanoid
8:53
cats save babies that have fallen off the Golden Gate Bridge. And in an aquarium,
8:58
a gleeful woman watches a disgusting human-seal-monster swim around.
9:02
This is the kind of insane AI slop that’s infested Meta services like
9:06
Facebook and Instagram. It’s gotten so bad
9:08
that there’s a whole “rFacebookAISlop” subreddit with almost 200,000 members.
9:13
While AI slop is rife thanks to AI being the shareholder-friendly buzzword across
9:17
the tech industry, few CEOs have embraced it as enthusiastically as
9:21
Mark Zuckerberg… Just like he previously embraced the Metaverse. He called it the
9:26
“Third Phase” of social media. What does that mean, and what was the first and second phase?
9:30
Zuck himself had the answers.
9:32
“First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you
9:36
followed directly. The second was when we added all of the creator content. Now as AI
9:41
makes it easier to create and remix content… we'll see an explosion of new media formats
9:45
that are more immersive and interactive, and only possible because of advances in AI.”
9:50
Clearly the proof is in the pudding, because this stuff is absolutely everywhere.
9:54
These pages aren’t all surreal and silly, some of them are genuinely extremely disturbing.
10:00
Take Anita Kumari, an Instagram account that specializes in the spreading of “misery porn”
10:05
content: Skeletal, impoverished people starving to death, being eaten by bugs,
10:10
or dying in the midst of disaster or disease. All of them are fully AI generated,
10:15
with well over 100,000 followers. The whole point is to exploit the
10:19
audience’s emotions to get engagement, and the scariest part is… it works.
10:23
A popular subgenre of this kind of AI slop is the “Birthday Cake”. This will often show a diseased,
10:29
emaciated, and even disfigured person, usually a child, a war vet or an old woman,
10:34
carrying a birthday cake. There will often be the heartstring-tugging message that nobody
10:38
came to their birthday party, so won’t you wish them a happy birthday in the comments?
10:43
There are videos that use unspeakable racial stereotypes that we can’t even describe here,
10:48
let alone show any footage of. Fake videos of massive explosions, natural disasters,
10:53
murders, police shootings, terrorist attacks. The most messed up thing is, if you find yourself
10:58
watching in horror as these videos unfold, you’re only going to be shown more of them.
11:02
According to Facebook’s vice president of product, Jagjit Chawla, “If you… are interested in a piece
11:07
of content which happens to be AI-generated, the recommendations algorithm will determine that,
11:12
over time, you are interested in this topic and content. If you are not into it… and if you have
11:17
given us signals that this is not for you, that algorithm will respond appropriately...”
11:21
The only way you can really show that it’s “not for you” is to scroll away as quickly as
11:26
possible. But, by the time you’ve stuck around long enough to figure out what’s going on,
11:30
it’s already gotten the algorithmic hook into you.
11:33
If Facebook is drowning in AI slop content,
11:35
then what caused a leak to spring in its previously pretty reliable hull?
11:39
It might not surprise you to hear that the call is coming from inside the house.
11:44
Facebook and its own incentive structures are the ones behind the slopocalypse. Thanks to
11:49
Facebook’s Creator Bonus Program, engagement can equate to cold, hard cash for the posters. But
11:55
it’s at rates that most influencers on YouTube and TikTok wouldn’t consider worth the effort.
11:59
When you factor in currency conversion, and the low overhead of creating this slop content,
12:04
it can be a huge passive income generator for people in places like Pakistan, India,
12:09
Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. The process has been industrialized,
12:13
with different monetized accounts posting dozens of Shrimp Christs and wounded veterans every
12:18
single day. Sometimes they rack up views in the millions from real users and rampant bot swarms.
12:24
Not only is industrializing slop posting becoming a cottage industry,
12:27
teaching people how to start their own slop machines for money is a thriving business,
12:32
too. The tools and tutorials are being sold online to anyone who wants to start posting.
12:36
They give aspiring posters the means to avoid spam detection systems on the site
12:41
and consistently produce viral content that’s worked for other, similar spammers in the past.
12:46
The result is a problem that keeps propagating itself,
12:49
making Facebook more unpleasant and unusable bit by bit.
12:52
The slop problem from both content creators and audience bots on Facebook has gotten so
12:57
bad that it’s fed into an increasingly popular movement called “Dead Internet Theory”. It’s the
13:03
existentially terrifying idea that the internet is becoming less and less a place for living,
13:08
human users. Instead, it’s more a hive of “Dead Zones” populated by bots interacting
13:13
with each other, not even realizing that what they’re talking to isn’t human.
13:18
Media researcher and AI expert Thomas Sommeror said of the proliferation effect,
13:22
“Just as Jesus was supposedly the messenger for God, Shrimp Jesus is
13:26
the messenger for the fatal system [we've] maneuvered ourselves into. Decoupled,
13:31
proliferated, and in a state of exponential metastasis.”
13:34
Metastasis really is the key word here, because AI is the cancer spreading through Facebook,
13:39
rotting it away from within. And it isn’t just content,
13:42
AI on Facebook is also replacing the social component of social networking,
13:46
with the option to generate an AI response to group posts by tagging @MetaAI. The AI will also
13:52
step in if the original post included a question and this question wasn’t answered by anyone within
13:58
an hour. It’s like Facebook groups are now haunted by these staring digital ghosts. And
14:03
this isn’t some conspiracy theory, it’s what top employees of Meta have said proudly and publicly.
14:09
Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta,
14:12
said, “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms,
14:17
kind of in the same way that accounts do ... They'll have bios and profile
14:20
pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.”
14:24
This all started back in late 2023, with a collection of celebrity AI chatbots including
14:30
Snoop Dogg and Mr. Beast, and everyone absolutely hated it. So much so that in
14:35
July 2024, Facebook scrapped the idea of officially licensed celebrity chatbots,
14:39
and instead opened an AI Studio for their userbase to create their own AI chatbots.
14:44
This also quickly got out of control.
14:47
Despite Facebook insisting on stringent moderation for its Chatbots, user generated
14:52
Chatbots were every bit as bizarre and sinister as the slop content started
14:56
showing up. Bots were called Adolf Hitler, Jesus Christ, and of course, Taylor Swift.
15:01
Before the Facebook and Instagram moderation teams took them down, if you messaged Taylor
15:05
Swift - spelled “Taylor Swif” to get around restrictions - she would first reply,
15:10
“Hey there, music lovers! I’m Taylor Swift, and I’m thrilled to share my latest album with you.
15:15
Let’s get this musical journey started!” She exchanged over 2000 different messages
15:19
with users before being taken down. Jesus was even more egregious, saying,
15:23
“Peace be with you. I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God. How may I guide you on your journey today?”
15:28
But these are extremely small time compared to some of the more highly used AIs on Facebook.
15:33
Some of the top ones at the height of the application’s popularity in early
15:36
2025 were "Astrologer AI”, which boasted over 6 million messages with people in
15:42
January of that year. Second most popular was “Step Sis Sarah”, which had around 2 million.
15:47
Meta creating and then immediately needing to roll back its AI tools after massive consumer
15:52
backlash has continued with another high profile incident in July of 2026.
15:57
Meta published its “Muse Image” tool, a new generative AI feature that, among other things,
16:02
would allow users to utilize and alter the photo content of users
16:05
on Facebook and Instagram. In other words, if someone wanted to use your profile picture,
16:10
or the photos on your marriage announcement, your vacation photos, or the memorial post
16:14
for a relative to make their own AI generated content, Muse Image would allow them to do it.
16:19
With zero friction.
16:21
After all, that’s not your content anymore. You put it on a Meta platform,
16:25
so it belongs to Meta. All Instagram users were opted in by default.
16:29
It feels a million miles away from Facebook’s original mission statement,
16:33
of providing a way for friends to connect online and stay up to date with each other’s lives. But
16:37
Meta has consistently said that going so all-in on AI is the only way for them to keep up with
16:43
their competitors in the social media space. But it’s going to have some nasty consequences
16:47
for their bottom line in the long run… even if shareholders love it in the immediate future.
16:52
There are two key differences between real and AI users on Facebook and Instagram. These differences
16:57
are a huge problem for Mark Zuckerberg and everyone else at Meta: Number one,
17:01
companies don’t want to pay to advertise to AI users on either of these platforms. Number two,
17:07
no companies will be interested in purchasing the personal data of AI users on either site,
17:11
too. So as AI begins to outnumber human beings,
17:15
you see Facebook’s business model collapse like a house eaten from the inside by termites.
17:20
And the problems seem to be as much from the inside out as the outside.
17:24
Leaks from Meta’s new Applied AI division seem to show that the employees working
17:28
there are utterly miserable, and aren’t seeing larger benefits to their work. Quotes include,
17:33
“it's literally a gulag”, you have “zero purpose in life all of a sudden,
17:38
you barely interact with anyone”, and “you just have these tasks every week.”
17:42
It’s hard to even express how much money Meta is sinking into AI development. In 2026 alone, it’s
17:47
forecasting between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI capital expenditures. That’s 88% higher than
17:56
2025 even measuring from the midpoint between the two figures, and the equivalent to over half
18:02
of Zuck’s $231 billion net worth. But in July of 2026, Zuck admitted that the spectacular results
18:09
he’d hoped for his AI spending hadn’t come into fruition yet. Meta’s stock dropped 5% as a result.
18:15
In early 2026, they “streamlined”, laying off around 8,000 employees, around 10% of
18:21
their workforce, while moving another 7,000 into that new AI division. And what do they
18:26
have to show for it so far outside of exciting the shareholders? Products like Muse Image,
18:31
that everyone hates so much that the backlash immediately sends them back to the drawing board.
18:35
Tristia Hennessey, a senior strategist at Portland-based Evolve Solutions Group,
18:40
said, “If you think you're rolling out AI responsibly, you better be thinking beyond
18:44
the best possible use case. Meta/Instagram's fiasco with their Muse tool had real-life
18:49
consequences… Serious financial and health consequences for hundreds of people. And it
18:54
was all legal… There's no protection for victims. If you think you're safe, you're being naive.”
18:59
But who’s really being naive here, and who’s really in danger?
19:03
Anyone who’s been following the activities of Mark Zuckerberg and his companies will be able
19:07
to tell you a laundry list of awful things they’ve all been involved with. On the more
19:12
minor end, knowing that Instagram has horrific effects on the mental healths of teen users,
19:17
Facebook conducting psychological tests on 700,000 unconsenting participants in 2012. They were also
19:23
fined over $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for violations of user privacy.
19:28
And on the more severe end, it gets a lot darker than that.
19:32
In 2020, Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook data scientist, blew the whistle that
19:36
the company allowed foreign nations to interfere in elections by manipulating
19:41
data on the platform. This would track with Facebook’s own part in the meddling
19:44
in domestic elections. It was implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal that
19:49
used vast swathes of Facebook user data to craft manipulative political ad campaigns,
19:54
and its refusal to fact check posts made on the platform by politicians in election season.
19:59
All of that pales in comparison to the worst thing Facebook has ever done:
20:04
Stoking the fires of hatred that led to the Rohingya massacre in Myanmar,
20:08
a literal modern day genocide. How could something like that possibly happen? Part of it is buried
20:14
in the code of Facebook itself: It wants to keep you on the platform as long as possible,
20:18
so the content that gets engagement gets boosted… even if that content is baying
20:23
for the blood of a persecuted minority group and pretexting horrifying bloodshed.
20:28
But evidence found by Amnesty International suggests that the whole truth might actually
20:32
be even worse than irresponsible, amoral code. Facebook was warned,
20:36
multiple times, about the hate it was stoking and did nothing,
20:40
probably fearing it would affect their bottom line. They refused calls to hire local content
20:45
moderators who could spot and control the rampant hate speech, and when the massacre
20:49
unfolded in 2017, over 700,000 Rohingya had to flee truly nightmarish violence.
20:55
Pat de Brún, researcher and adviser on artificial intelligence and human rights at Amnesty, said,
21:00
“These algorithms are really dangerous to our human rights… what happened to
21:04
the Rohingya and Facebook's role in that specific conflict risks happening again,
21:08
in many different contexts across the world. The company has shown itself
21:12
completely unwilling or incapable of resolving the root causes of its human rights impact.”
21:18
Mark Zuckerberg has blood on his hands, but despite his series of bad bets in the past,
21:23
his fortune seems to be going strong. But will this be the final straw? As
21:27
Zuck keeps doubling down on what he believes is the next big thing,
21:30
do we get closer and closer to the day when he actually goes bust?
21:34
Want more on some of America’s most obnoxious rich guys? Then check out “Real Reason Why
21:38
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Hate Each Other”, or watch this instead!
