13 Mar 2026 Search

Meta (the company) has done way too many crimes and needs to be shut down. Even one of their own industry organizations has kicked them out over their ongoing fraudulent ads problem. And the “IG is a drug” trial isn’t going too well for them either. Time to wrap it up.

The problem is that there are way too many people who are currently only in touch with each other on the Meta sites and apps. So how will a future monitoring trustee manage the process of putting an orderly end to Meta, without imposing unacceptable costs on the people who have gotten into a situation where they depend on Meta’s shenanigans?

This is how I would handle it if they wanted to appoint me to the monitoring trustee position. I have other stuff going on, but this will help out legit companies like [redacted], and will be a productive step toward ending the problematic attribution cartel thing so I think I can do it fairly. If you need a lawyer to be the monitoring trustee I can recommend some, lmk

So here’s how to do the shutdown. Borrow an idea from airline overbooking.

  1. No more new accounts.

  2. Update the sites and apps to require every Meta user to put in a price for which they would quit. Nobody gets booted off involuntarily, they’ll get an amount of money that they would prefer to their Meta account. Some people, infrequent users or those who were planning to quit anyway, would put in a low amount. Some people, such as Meta advertisers, people who want to work for Meta advertisers, and those who can’t reach their friends and family any other way, would put in a high amount. Users would be able to change their price at any time until it is accepted.

  3. Every month, under the monitoring trustee’s supervision, Meta buys out the 50 million users who have asked the lowest prices. Those 50 million people lose access to Meta. When they log in to the sites or launch the apps, they only get a screen with info on the status of their payment, an option to download their photos and other info, and a way to put in to recover their account in case it was compromised. But each user is already better off overall, because they each get some amount of money that they already said is more than Meta is worth to them. As groups of people leave, the network effects for staying on Meta become less powerful, so remaining users would likely choose to adjust their prices downward. Yes, the monitoring trustee would have to set up a support operation to handle problems with people’s payments, but as Meta develops less new code, employees can be transferred to work on support and keep their health insurance. (Remember we’re going for minimum disruption here and that includes employees’ families.)

  4. Eventually, Meta runs out of money and can’t buy out the next 50 million, so the remaining user database (containing info on those who named the highest prices) gets sold in bankruptcy. Those people never get paid to shut down their accounts. So everyone has an incentive to state a fair price and look for alternative communication methods, but nobody gets a sudden shock until the very end, so everyone will have multiple chances to avoid it.

After step 4, whoever acquired the database can start making new accounts again. But in the meantime the users who left would have gone and made accounts on other services (will Microsoft start LinkedIn for Families? Can Google flip a feature flag to turn Google Plus back on? Or maybe Bluesky or the Fediverse will add enough features to become a contender?).