It's also scary that, as a participant to this market struggle for dominance, Facebook has tools at its disposal to severely restrict the growth of its competit

It's also scary that, as a participant to this market struggle for dominance, Facebook has tools at its disposal to severely restrict the growth of its competition by declaring them a harmful meme. They have publicly declared their ability and process for reducing distribution on such "viral" memes after earlier incidents where the spread of misinformation through chain/group forwards led to violence.[1a][1b] [edit] Here's a more relevant link about the implied distribution controls: [1c] Since this effort launched in 2018, the definition of the content that can be restricted has morphed to include "Fake news" and "Rumors" in addition to pure violence alone. Facebook owned companies have a long history of distrust from the Indian public and this has played out at least one earlier time with Facebooks attempt at a free internet in India, being labelled the equivalent of the British empires attempt at colonization [2] The narrative in India (Or other parts of the world where i have large teams who have a casual enough relationship with me to talk about these issues) isn't presently helped by the happenings in the US where large US tech companies have effectively levied sanctions against entities with political affiliation to one political movement. This is anecdotal, but i'm hearing a lot of "What happens if they decide tomorrow that we don't fit their values?" ; There's also an ongoing financial dispute that has prompted Google to block Australian news sites [3] and the forums there are split between the two sides and how this diminishes independence of media thanks to unparalleled market power of tech companies. [1a] https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and-violence-in-india/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and... [1b] https://blog.whatsapp.com/more-changes-to-forwarding https://blog.whatsapp.com/more-changes-to-forwarding [1c] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/19/facebook-fake-news-violence-moderation-plan https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/19/facebook-... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32795270 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32795270 [2] https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/google-blocks-australian-news-in-experiment-20210113-p56tqd https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/google-blo...