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End of Facebook? Social media giant loses $200B as users opt to #DeleteFacebook

"Facebook's answers were so evasive ... they really raise questions about what Facebook might be hiding," said Senator Richard Blumenthal

During the last three months of 2021, Facebook recorded a reduction of nearly 500,000 daily logins. In an effort to compete with TikTok, Zuckerberg reaffirmed that Meta is working hard to build its short-form video Reels. Meta is the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. According to the Washington Post, Zuckerberg noted during an earnings call on Wednesday that "people have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time," and that "apps like TikTok are growing very quickly."

Facebook's stock dropped more than 20% in extended trading on Wednesday after surprisingly high spending on its Metaverse project resulted in a rare drop in its fourth-quarter profit. In after-hours trading, Meta's stock dropped 22.6 percent to $249.90, wiping away $200 billion from the company's market worth.

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During the fourth quarter of 2021, the firm put a lot of money into its 'Reality Labs' segment, which comprises virtual reality headsets and augmented reality technology, which resulted in profits declining. According to Investopedia, Zuckerberg, who is worth $107 billion, owned more than 398 million shares in Meta by the end of 2020. When the company's stock sank on Wednesday, the CEO personally lost more than $29 billion based on his declared holdings.

According to analysts, investors were 'taken aback' by the amount of ad dollars the firm lost as a result of TikTok's rise, even though they had expected falling user growth. Despite Meta's own Reels product on Instagram, TikTok dominates the short-form user-generated video industry.

The stock market's dip on Wednesday was attributed to a number of other issues, including privacy improvements in Apple's iOS and economic challenges, according to Meta. Lower-than-expected growth was attributed to inflation as well as supply chain concerns affecting advertiser spending, according to the business. Users have also shifted to items that don't earn as much revenue as its main newsfeeds, such as Reels videos, according to Meta.

"On the impressions side, we expect continued headwinds from both increased competition for people’s time and a shift of engagement within our apps towards video surfaces like Reels, which monetize at lower rates than Feed and Stories," Facebook said in a statement to CNBC.

The Zuckerberg empire is also drawing negative publicity because of lawsuits like the one filed by Brittney Doffing. Doffing, a mom from Oregon, claims her daughter was a happy adolescent before she buckled and purchased her daughter a smartphone for her 14th birthday in March 2020 so she could stay in touch with her pals during the pandemic. Her complaint filed against Meta's Instagram and Snapchat alleged that the social media platforms had turned her daughter into a violent cell phone addict with an eating issue and many psychiatric admissions within the last two years. The suit has been filed with the support of the Social Media Victims Law Center in the US District Court in Oregon on January 20.

Then, there is also the bad publicity emerging after former employee Frances Haugen disclosed a series of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal, which published them in a series called 'The Facebook Files' last year. As a result, Meta has been under fire for its impact on young people. In March 2020, a statement on an internal message board stated that the app found that 32% of girls said Instagram made them feel worse about their bodies if they already have issues. "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls," said a slide from a 2019 internal presentation.

Zuckerberg has even stated that he intends to offer a product for children under the age of thirteen. When asked if the impacts of how safe it would be would be researched, he informed Congress that it would be safe, saying, "I believe the answer is yes."  The research has never been made public by Facebook. "We are not aware of a consensus among studies or experts about how much screen time is 'too much,'" the company said in its response to senators in August when requested for details on how its products damaged young girls. Senator Richard Blumenthal told the Journal that Facebook's replies were imprecise, raising suspicions that the company was concealing the research on purpose.

"Facebook's answers were so evasive - failing to respond to all our questions - that they really raise questions about what Facebook might be hiding. Facebook seems to be taking a page from the textbook of Big Tobacco - targeting teens with potentially dangerous products while masking the science in public." People on Twitter have started a hastag called delete Facebook after hearing about business losses and other issues that the company is facing. These tweets are shown below.