While Facebook claims its size helps it defend the US against Chinese companies like TikTok, history shows TikTok succeeded partly due to FB's corporate goals
more than a billion dollars—that between 15 percent and 22 percent of all ads shown through Facebook on iOS during [the spring and summer of 2018] were TikTok ads.” https://promarket.org/... Matt Stoller / @matthewstoller : It really is critical to start recognizing how dangerous Facebook's monopoly really is and how it empowered Chinese competitors. https://promarket.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Matt Stoller's argument in Pro Market reframes the standard defense of Facebook's scale: rather than a bulwark against Chinese apps, he contends Facebook's monopoly posture actively helped ByteDance break into the US. The mechanism is well-documented in earlier coverage — ByteDance spent roughly $1B advertising TikTok in 2018, heavily promoting the app on Facebook and Instagram, where TikTok reportedly made up 15–22% of all iOS ads shown through Facebook that spring and summer.
That spending pattern is why analysts have called TikTok's rise a cautionary tale for social media startups, and it lands just as Washington debates whether the TikTok fight should produce a thoughtful regulatory model for big tech regardless of where a company is based.
First-order effects
- Facebook collected more than a billion dollars from the company it now frames as a national-security threat, meaning its own ad business financed a direct competitor's user acquisition during the exact window it could have squeezed TikTok out.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers learned that reach can be bought off-platform at scale, which helps explain why TikTok later repositioned itself as an entertainment platform rather than a social network and reported no slowdown in ad revenue even as Facebook faced copycat pressure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, gatekeeper platforms face an uncomfortable structural choice between policing their inventory against challengers — inviting antitrust scrutiny like Stoller's — and monetizing them — funding the next TikTok, a tension the emerging big-tech regulatory debate has yet to resolve.
The trend: Platform monopolies are being reexamined less for what they block than for what they profitably enable, with ad-revenue flows to challengers becoming a new lens in the antitrust case against big tech.