On October 28, 2021, the company formerly known as Facebook announced a monumental rebrand, changing its name to Meta and focusing on the development of what their CEO Mark Zuckerberg termed the “metaverse,” a far-off virtual reality where people will be able to “teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute,” where “your TV, your perfect work setup with multiple monitors, your board games and more” will be “holograms designed by creators around the world.”
This reality is not lost on Facebook. A decline was anticipated, and was a major motivator behind the pivot to Meta. The company has attempted to diversify, investing heavily into Virtual Reality, and Zuckerberg has declared that “from now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
These issues do not subsist in isolation; they are but the most recent evidence of a long-existing rot at the center of Meta and Facebook’s core, which has allowed for Facebook to become one of the most dangerous platforms in the world for Democracy and Human Rights.
Facebook was at the center of the insurrection at the United States Capitol last year, with internal documents and reporting from The Atlantic establishing the company’s role in promoting authoritarian thought on its platform through its newsfeed and algorithm. Groups like “Stop the Steal,” which had hundreds of thousands of followers within hours of its creation, proved tremendously persuasive, and Facebook proved a critical breeding ground for individuals convinced by President Trump’s accusations of election interference to organize.
Though social media can and has been weaponized as a tool for political manipulation, Facebook in particular has been deliberately sluggish in its response, often ignoring or delaying the implementation of research commissioned by the company itself. A proposal to prevent people from seeing conspiracies reacted to by the user’s friends, which the company knew would limit violence, was rejected by Zuckerberg, along with a series of other recommendations. Fixes implemented for the 2020 election were rolled back after its conclusion, releasing misinformation which still bubbled below the platform’s surface. By prioritizing algorithms and metrics over user well-being, Facebook has not only threatened its own survival, but that of democracy writ large in the United States.
While Facebook has had tremendously damaging impacts on American political discourse, its effect on other countries, particularly those which are still developing and therefore more reliant on large companies like Facebook for communication, are far more harrowing. The company is facing a lawsuit for hundreds of billions of dollars after its negligence in Myanmar contributed to a genocide of Rohingya Muslims, where, as happened in the U.S., inflammatory content was allowed to spread among extremists. Fake news spread on Facebook in Ethiopia has “fanned ethnic violence” because the company has refused to curtail its engagement-based algorithms.
As Facebook transitions to Meta, there is a real sense that, rather than confronting the tremendous devastation it has waged, the company is instead changing its mission and name in an effort to brush it aside. However, the events of the last week show that such a path forward is far more tenuous than previously expected. The company’s prioritization of growing engagement and users over all else has finally led to stagnation, and governments no longer seem interested in allowing the giant to regulate itself. If Facebook is to be rebirthed as Meta in the next decade, it must confront the rot which envelops its algorithms and platforms, or risk suffering the fate of internet giants past.