What do you mean by "Facebook could buy Steem if they would feel threatened" ?
Steem is a decentralised platform based on blockchain technology. How do you buy it ? Who is the person to look for to buy Steem ? There is no buying Steem.
I'm quite sure Facebook is already well aware of Steem. They have people doing only that (looking for treatening new disruptive social platforms). They are probably freaking out as they learn how it's built and they are incapable of stopping or buying it.
You would buy steemit by literally buying steem off the marketplace. They could literally appoint a single FB employee to be a giant whale and be a pain in the ass to the content here. The reputation system could do nothing to that as transferring steam to a new account is a piece of cake.
Facebook is not freaking out about steemit. They dgaf.
To become a big whale, they would start of buying the whole existing market. Once done they are still not a gigantic whale and the price has reach 10 or 20$ / steem. Then, it starts to be much more expensive to be a gigantic whale, if they persist, steems would rise to 50 to 100$. Once there, even Facebook couldn't buy much more to become this bad actor gigantic whale.
Even if they could buy that much steem, it would bring so much value to the market cap that there attempt to destroy the platform would have the opposit effect and propulse it to the moon.
I think we call it checkmate !
I don't know if they are worried about Steem but they should !