"Facebook’s 'imperative'" — according to Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, now Meta’s CTO — "its raison d’etre — was to be that product that everyone used, the tool that unified at last a fragmented human race in a single, vast network."

"'And the company would pursue that imperative at any cost, even the cost of users’ lives, 'because that’s what we do,' he wrote. 'We connect people.' Bosworth later insisted, once the memo had come to light, that he had written it in the spirit of debate, and that he didn’t really believe what he wrote. Zuckerberg said the same.... But Wednesday’s earnings report showed that Facebook’s ascent has stalled just about everywhere. The biggest decline in daily usage was not in the United States but in a category that it calls 'rest of world,' including Latin America and Africa....  Zuckerberg knew before just about anyone else that social media was no longer enough to keep the company on top. Now he’s trying to will into existence a grand new vision of a digital world in which we all have second lives that play out through avatars inhabiting virtual spaces and realms.... [T]he end of Facebook’s growth era marks a turning point in the history of social media and the Internet. If Zuckerberg couldn’t connect the whole world with Facebook, given all the resources and momentum and desire one could ask for, he may have to confront the possibility that no single network ever will. "

From "Facebook’s dream of connecting the whole world is dead/The platform’s first-ever decline in active users is a landmark event in social media history" by Will Oremus and Elizabeth Dwoskin (WaPo).