Facebook is in the “Oh, sweetie” phase of its corporate timeline. That’s the phase that comes right after “extremist hotspot” and right before “certain implosion.”
First, the heavy-duty Facebook Papers, which were leaked by former-employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen, hit the floor and put several cracks in the linoleum. That’s when Mark Zuckerberg decided that, instead of working swiftly to change how he runs the company, he would announce a surface-level rebrand: The company (but not the app) will now be called Meta.
Every step in the nearly two decades of Facebook’s dominance has been guided by an incurable lust for growth and incurable fear of irrelevance.
Oh, sweetie, you think a little rebrand is the end of your troubles? That’s cute. Or evil, I can’t tell which yet. Either way, it’s an obnoxious response.
Apparently, Facebook wants to lean into the “metaverse,” which Zuck thinks is the future of everything. The metaverse is the entire world of virtual “places” where people can meet, work, and play. So, basically, it’s a coffee shop without any of the things that make it fun to be at a coffee shop. Plus, it largely involves those virtual reality headsets.
If you’ve loved wearing a mask during the pandemic, VR headsets are a ton more uncomfortable. Plus, they make me nauseous. Color me skeptical, but anything that gives me motion sickness can’t possibly be the future of everything. Can it? I mean, I guess boats were a big deal in their time. But boats carried things and people, while VR does . . . what exactly?
But VR is beside the point. Everyone knows that Facebook has been losing ground among teenagers and young adults, as well as among old people. I’m legally required to make the joke that the only thing this name change is doing is putting the “Meta” in “Metamucil” . . . because old people like their fiber supplements.
In a desperate attempt to remain relevant, the folks at Facebook—er, Meta—have tried every horrible tactic to keep people on the site, except to make it actually good for people.
Every step in the nearly two decades of Facebook’s dominance has been guided by an incurable lust for growth and incurable fear of irrelevance. Ethics has never been a big part of the picture.
For example, there was evidence that the “like” button on Instagram was causing stress and anxiety among teens, for whom not being liked is not a good thing. But Facebook found that removing the “like” button would reduce engagement. A reduction in online engagement could be an overall benefit to the mental health of teens, but Meta doesn’t want an overall benefit to the mental health of teens. They want people to STAY ONLINE.
They want this so badly that their sinister algorithms favored negative emojis to positive ones, which led to feeds filled with endlessly negative stories. They knew these feeds made people angry, but that didn’t matter because an enraged public stayed online.
And here’s the thing: I have a hunch that if the folks at Facebook or Meta or whatever were just nicer—if they cared more about mental health and the spread of misinformation—that would make them more popular.
They could have been the Tom Hanks of social media. Nobody hates Tom Hanks! Or they could have been the Oprah of tech. People respect and admire Oprah because of her ethical positions. Tom and Oprah are both rewarded for their moral uprightness with a type of timeless, intergenerational popularity that also happens to be very lucrative.
Facebook has gotten into this cycle where it thinks that capitalism and profits are always incompatible with ethics. But some of the world’s most ethical companies are also the biggest money makers.
It’s possible that, in the short term, human trafficking made beaucoup bucks for Facebook. It’s also likely that extremism was profitable for Facebook. But that’s not a long-term strategy because people catch on and then they end up hating you.
Now Facebook has to pretend that it is all fired up about VR headsets. What about just trying to be good, moral, and decent? What if those guiding principles could also be very lucrative?
The way out of this public relations nightmare isn’t by rebranding with some half-hearted belief in virtual reality in the hopes that we’ll all be distracted. The way to fix the problem is by actually being good.
What a concept.