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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, life and culture.

My name is Freddie Gray.

I'm the deputy editor of The Spectator.

I'm delighted to be joined today by Guy Clapton,

who is host of the Near Futurist podcast,

and we're going to be asking what on earth is happening with Facebook

or, as the company is now officially called meta.

Guy, Facebook enjoyed like all major tech companies, a substantial bounce during the pandemic,

but it's recently collapsed. Yesterday had the biggest ever fall in its share price, I think,

about 25%. And there is a sort of general sense that Mark Zuckerberg is losing control a little bit.

What's going on is Facebook in a death spiral, as some people are saying, on social media?

As if people would ever exaggerate things on social media, how could anyone think such a thing?

The answer is that I probably not, or at least not just yet. What's happened with Facebook is nothing

that it hasn't faced before. I don't know whether you're remembering 2012 when they first did

their IPO onto the American Stock Exchange onto Wall Street. The first thing the share price did was to fall by 50%,

which meant that an awful lot of people lost an awful lot of money, including Mark Zuckerberg himself,

of course, as he would have done this time around as well. At that point, I think what had happened

was, A, they overvalued it, and B, they appeared to have nowhere to go. People thought it had reached

saturation point.

...