META

Meta Platforms (META) revisited the area near its all-time highs after its leading founder Mark Zuckerberg’s most encouraging announcement that his media giant is embarking on its journey to restore the right to free expression of opinion. When wearing an extremely rare Swiss watch with an exclusive Greubel Forsey "Hand Made 1" writing on his left wrist (worth about $900,000, according to Bloomberg), he shed some light on the social platform owner's decision to end its previous thorough and boring automatized fact checking procedures in a Facebook video this Tuesday. "We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violation," he, in particular, said, while claiming "a more personalized approach" to political content, so that "people who want to see more of it in their feeds can". In an official article headed "More Speech and Fewer Mistakes", Meta noted later that "on platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display... but that’s free expression".

Since 2019, Meta developed growingly complex systems to manage content in response to "societal and political pressure" but now they have become ready to admit "this approach has gone too far". "What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas", is one of Mark Zuckerberg's actual quotes, as one more of his sentences said "we have reached the point that there are just too many mistakes and too much censorship", so that "it's time to get back to our roots". Starting in the U.S., the largest social community in the world (more than 3 billion users) would change its algorithm, moving to a so-called "Community Notes" mode to personally complain about unacceptable and intolerable posts or remarks on the platform.

This happened in the very first regular trading week of January, and so the initial and enthusiastic bullish wave up to $631.55 per share was quickly offset by an immediate technical recovery to $605 and below. Yet, the Wall Street crowd bought up the dips without shelving. There's not a doubt in my mind that postponed and more lasting effects are all still ahead, since this is a real revolution in adjusting Facebook and Instagram closer to the standards, which were recently refounded by the former Twitter, now X. The shift was clearly launched ahead of the president-elect Trump's inauguration, as the key MMA figure Dana White, who was an important part of Trump's election campaign, was newly appointed to Meta's board. Another Republican policy executive Joel Kaplan has become a head of the global policy department at Meta. Zuckerberg flew down to Trump's Mar-a-Lago place in November and later donated $1 million to his inaugural fund, blaming the present Democratic administration for increased censorship pressure that prompted a global trend towards increased regulation. I believe this is a time for reckoning, which can create an additionally positive momentum for the stock's further rising.

My personal target price for Meta stock is well above $750, as I already assessed the company as very promising before the announced changes in policy. More suitable textual and visual stuff without artificial limitations on free discussion will certainly attract more advertisers, also encouraging a large number of former users to return for posting and reading. It is well known that many temporary bans of users were even too far from being based on divisive political considerations or other most controversial topics like the race card, national conflicts or vaccinations. I personally know of some most ridiculous cases like Christmas cards featuring a Madonna nursing a baby being removed, and users were banned, or art posts with ancient Greek sculptures that included bare chests of statues as another good and strange example. Sometimes quite harmless messages were flagged as hate speech by stupid algorithms. Of course, many people were offended because of this kind of attitude, and they have gone away, but now some of them may try to restore their relationship with Facebook and Instagram. As a result, Meta will be able to raise even more money, adding additional revenue and profits to its records of 2024. Artificial intelligence recommendations and targeted advertising will only help in doing business.

We'll see if there are many taboo topics. But I'm an optimist, looking forward to a flurry of memes about the "great state of Canada", Greenland, all that hyping trolling of Trump and Musk and other current agenda. I don't know if our world is starting to return to a more or less normal normality, but Meta seems to have decided to repaint its way of mirroring the real world into colours that can better match the full spectrum of customers' views. I saw it was good. And here is my final piece of The Rolling Stones styled ode. Please sing it mentally in Mick Jagger's voice:

Smiling Facebook I can see,

And it’s for me, I sit and watch as tears go Bu-u-u-uy...