ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Why Facebook’s Stock Market Pain Is Necessary—And Will Continue.

Here’s what CFO David Wehner said on the fateful earnings call: revenue growth will probably “decline by high single-digit percentages from prior quarters” and “we are also giving people who use our services more choices around data privacy which may have an impact on our revenue growth.” Wehner also noted that Facebook is trying more to promote its users’ personal Stories timelines, which currently bring in less money—this is as opposed to users’ Newsfeeds, which is where all those problematic fake news issues fester.

So, is this bad? I think journalist-turned-investor Kim-Mai Cutler hit the nail on the head when she noted on Twitter that “the last three to six months have been reporters screaming about [Facebook] to take more civil, public accountability (which I support). So maybe the headline should be that it’s OK [for Facebook to take] a $142B hit to resolve really serious, long-term structural issues.”

The fact is that the changes wrought by the GDPR and the Cambridge Analytica affair were long overdue. Facebook has been able to achieve its mammoth scale largely through its free exploitation of people’s data, and those people are now both wise to the implications and—in Europe and soon California—able to do something about it.

Facebook shares are down about 19% today, wiping out three months of big gains.