Social media loves to have targets that “everyone agrees” are terrible and worthy of hating. Being part of a righteously angry mob is fun, gives a nice safe dopamine hit and lets you show you are part of the in-group.

Which isn’t to say that Meta is innocent and Zuckerberg is a poor victim, of course. But it does mean that it’s very easy to go overboard and believe false accusations that also fit with the narrative that Meta is terrible and awful and evil. There was a post a couple of weeks ago about Threads and the narrative in that conversation was that Meta was dedicated to eradicating open source (Embrace Extend Extinguish, think of XMPP!). I tried pointing out Meta’s many contributions to open source but redirecting the mob was hopeless. Sure, the motives of these contributions are selfish. They want to crush their enemies. But in this case their enemies are OpenAI and Microsoft, and the weapon they’re using is to fling open the walled gardens OpenAI depends on for the common man to enjoy.

It’s a useful cautionary tale to keep in mind whenever there’s a target that everyone around you hates because they’re “obviously” the devil. Maybe they are, but it’s likely more complicated than it seems.