Reminder: abolish Meta.

A

blog post

Date published

[2026-04-13 Mon]

It shouldn't be news to anyone that Meta is a bad actor¹. The recent ruling that Meta deliberately designs addictive products² is just the latest in a long litany of sins.

But it's hard to escape Meta. Think about the Meta products around you for a second (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Threads). Someone in your family probably uses Facebook to see what's new; some of your friends probably use Instagram to share their lives; your community group probably uses Facebook and WhatsApp to organise itself; someone near you probably uses Facebook to advertise their events; and your neighbours probably use Facebook Marketplace to trade things locally. In fact, you probably use a Meta product yourself, reluctantly or not, given that somewhere around a third to a half of the world uses one of them monthly³. We're all tangled up in Meta's net one way or another.

So: Meta's bad. It's not a secret. But still everyone uses it. How come? First off, it's a monopoly, with a network effort as strong as the gravitational pull of a black hole. Secondly, Meta has boundless resources with which to capture and control. And thirdly: the things that people use Meta products for are genuinely worthwhile⁴.

Meta provides a tightly integrated stack of tools for communication, coordination, information discovery and market activity. All of this can be socially useful. Yet the harms will always outweigh the benefits when it's mediated by a capitalist megacorp with a narrow, shallow, ulterior motive: growth, profit and return on investment⁵.

Our goal should be to abolish Meta as an organisation, but not necessarily the functions that it provides. There's plenty of scope for the rebuilding and recoding of those in a socially useful and environmentally stable way.

How to do so? We need to pursue the triad of digital transformation to resist, regulate and recode Meta⁶. This will involve tactics of digital rupture and resistance⁷, digital regulation and reform⁸, and digital alternative-building⁹. Systemic change needs all three: to abolish Meta, we'll need to work within Meta, against Meta, and beyond Meta^{10, 11}.

It'll be a big programme. There are plenty of existing alternatives to Meta products¹², but we'll need things like adversarial interoperability and bridges to help people migrate. We'll need municipal or state support to operate the alternatives¹³. We'll need regulatory support to mandate interoperability and to take Meta to task when it takes its actions as a bad actor. In the meantime, we'll need to resist a lot of its practises, making use of tools like ad-blockers and tracker-blockers. We should educate, agitate and organise against Meta to get the word out and spread the programme. We need to be ready with credible options for when the periodic 'shocks' arise that expose the rot at Meta's core to the world¹⁴.

For me, this is all part of a bigger picture of 'reclaiming the stacks' and working towards a transition from digital capitalism to digital ecosocialism. Find out more at my hub page: Reclaim the stacks.