Don’t Succumb to Inevitability

After perhaps the most challenging press week in Facebook’s history, with promises of a company rebrand on the horizon, Mark Zuckerberg and crew have officially announced that the tech giant’s parent company will now be known as Meta. The announcement also involves a new icon, a misshapen infinity symbol that mimics the shape of an M. According to the press release, this new name and logo reflect the company’s trajectory to an integrated digital future that blends on-and offline living.

We recently covered what it means to be a part of the Metaverse and our speculations regarding this hybrid existence stand. But our intention behind doubling back on the topic is to also address the philosophical why behind this timing of this announcement— and simultaneously dispute the inevitability of this newly charted course.

Facebook has faced sharp criticism in the public eye over the last five years, first experiencing extensive blowback leading up to and following the 2016 election. After denying a “fake news” issue in late 2016, Facebook later admitted in 2017 that outside influences had used the platform to influence potential voters and inevitably sway the election. This led to very public consternation over how much authority the tech platform has over our democratic system, which was only bolstered by the 2018 news regarding Cambridge Analytica, an outside political consulting firm that improperly accessed 87 million Facebook profiles (initially only reported as 50 million) and targeted on-the-fence voters to try and convince them to vote for then-candidate Donald Trump.

The Federal Trade Commission nearly immediately launched an investigation into how Cambridge Analytica harvested such extensive user data and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to Capitol Hill to testify before members of Congress on the safety and diversity of the platform’s products in an attempt to fend off accusations of a monopoly.

These Congressional hearings extended well into 2019 with continued conversation around anti-trust complaints. Facebook was slapped with a $5B fine for their missteps with Cambridge Analytica as they continued to fend off antitrust investigations with the Department of Justice and a separate case led by state attorneys from 47 states.

Coming into 2020, Facebook’s public perception was shaky. And then COVID-19 hit. As people were stuck at home, daily use of the platform skyrocketed—and so did a whole new batch of complaints regarding the platform’s tendency to lean into propaganda as misinformation regarding the novel coronavirus zipped through News Feeds, posts and came down from the White House itself. As of March 2021, over 430 pages—reaching 45 million Facebook users—were still up and still spouting inaccuracies about COVID-19 and its vaccinations, despite Facebook’s leadership insisting that content moderation was aggressively moving to eliminate these threats.

The most recent indignity comes off the heels of whistleblower Francis Haugen’s delivery of the Facebook Papers, a package of thousands of internal Facebook documents that affirm the tech company has well documented its negative impacts across social and political spaces. Among the more damning information that came out of the Facebook Papers was the acknowledgment that the January 6th Capital Insurrectionists utilized the platform to organize the Stop the Seal movement. Facebook employees aired frustrations that the organization knew its technology was prone to this type of use case and still didn’t do enough to thwart efforts.

Oh, and if this wasn’t all completely horrific, the Wall Street Journal also reported in September 2021 that Facebook also knows that its platform, Instagram, harms the mental and physical health of teenage girls but has done little to modify or rectify the situation, despite data points indicating its vulnerable users are driven to anxiety, depression, self-harm and body dysmorphia because of the app.

We’re here to say that’s not an inevitability. We survived without Facebook for a long time. And we could survive without its suite of products in the future. Facebook leaders are hoping that a move to Meta will obscure, maybe even absolve, the company of its past wrongdoing. But we can prevent that from happening. As we weigh the convenience of the platform against the destruction it causes, we can choose a future that does not further injure our ability to critically think, embrace information and discern for ourselves.

Ultimately, in my opinion, that is Facebook’s greatest sin. It has manipulated existence for so many that the real world no longer holds any credibility. Furthering that exploitation is unjustifiable.

So yes, Zuckerberg will tell you that the Metaverse is coming. But we’re saying, it’s time to politely decline that friend request—and invest in a tech future that cultivates the best of us, not the worst.

What does that look like? A reduced use of Meta products, for one, and a commitment to holding tech companies accountable for their actions. It means researching the implications of technology products and voting for political candidates who believe that tech companies, like all other businesses, have to answer for the way their products affect the American people. Diversifying news sources and reasonably questioning the authenticity of online social experiences, backed by the knowledge that tech companies are not actively moderating against misinformation. Just as Facebook's rise to Meta has taken nearly 20 years, we don't believe the transition away from Facebook's products will be immediate—but we want to affirm that it is both incredibly necessary and wildly overdue.