While battling to fend off one of its worst crises, Facebook changed its parent company name to “Meta”, a step seen as an attempt to move past being a scandal-plagued social network to its virtual reality vision for the future.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – the three apps most used by billions around the world – will keep their names under the rebranding that pivots wide ambitions for the “metaverse,” which according to the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, would blur the lines between the physical world and the digital one.
Zuckerberg argued that the new name demonstrates the company’s commitment to building its virtual reality version of the internet that would make online experiences – like chatting with a friend or attending a concert – feel face-to-face.
Facebook has recently come under fire after a trove of documents, leaked by a whistleblower, revealed that Facebook purposely hid research about its platform’s negative effects on mental health in teenagers. Frances Haugen, who worked at Facebook for two years before leaving in May, claimed that the company is aware of how its platforms are used to spread misinformation, hate and violence. Haugen also claimed that the company stoked division by allowing disinformation on the platform to go unchecked.
However, looking to the rebranding move as only a distract from the platform’s whistleblower crisis could be a mistake as there are experts who see it as a costly effort to save itself from very other real threats such as the eroding youth user base, regulatory scrutiny and even the influence fellow giants like Apple hold over Facebook.
But still one of the most serious hypotheses about the real reason behind the Facebook move is that it’s an attempt to control the future of the internet that will allow social media to take larger space from our lives. It’s the hypothesis that raised the concern of many activists who warn against the growing dangers of social media that wield great power with little responsibility.
It’s reasonable that before giving more space for such platforms to control our lives, we should eliminate those loopholes that exist in the current platforms.
It’s reasonable also not to leave the fate of the internet future in the hands of an entity that usually looks to the amazing benefits, while often missing the potential harms and impacts that could also come as a result.
The new metaverse or the virtual reality version of the internet seems like an interesting thing. However, the recent ‘Facebook Files’ disclosures and the latest outage that left billions of people out of their accounts for several hours, may point to some flaws somewhere within its systems, intentionally created or not; hence the plausibility of contemplating the probable consequences of such a trend.
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