# Reminder: abolish Meta. A : blog post Date published : [2026-04-13 Mon] It shouldn't be news to anyone that Meta is a bad actor[^fn:1]. The recent ruling that Meta deliberately designs addictive products[^fn:2] 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 monthly[^fn:3]. 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 worthwhile[^fn:4]. 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 investment[^fn:5]. 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 Meta[^fn:6]. This will involve tactics of digital rupture and resistance[^fn:7], digital regulation and reform[^fn:8], and digital alternative-building[^fn:9]. Systemic change needs all three: to abolish Meta, we'll need to work within Meta, against Meta, and beyond Meta[^fn:10]^,[^fn:11]. It'll be a big programme. There are plenty of existing alternatives to Meta products[^fn:12], but we'll need things like adversarial interoperability and bridges to help people migrate. We'll need municipal or state support to operate the alternatives[^fn:13]. 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 world[^fn:14]. 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]]. # Footnotes ¹ [[Meta is a bad actor]]. ² [[Meta and YouTube deliberately designed addictive products]]. ³ [[A lot of people use Meta products]]. ⁴ [[The world uses Meta products for some positive functions]]. ⁵ [[Facebook only cares about money]]. ⁶ [[We should resist, regulate and recode Meta]]. ⁷ [[Tactics of digital resistance]]. ⁸ [[Tactics of digital reform]]. ⁹ [[Tactics of digital prefiguration]]. ¹⁰ [[Work within the system, against the system, and beyond the system]]. ¹¹ [[Systemic change is a combination of reformist, alternative-building and revolutionary logics]]. ¹² [[Libre software alternatives to Meta products]]. ¹³ [[Public-civic collaboration, coop incubators and stewarding digital infrastructure as a commons]]. ¹⁴ [[The left needs a shock doctrine]].