FB was bad but is Meta-Worse?
Let’s be honest, everybody hates Meta. It makes us sad, misuses our data, and makes our hexagenerian uncles even less bearable at dinners. But social media (a majority of which is now dominated by a single company) is a necessary evil of the modern-day. It has shaped and altered human interaction significantly in the last couple of decades and with the emergence of the Metaverse, things are bound to change further.
Humans are complex and human interactions are even more complex. Our ability to communicate effectively has been a game-changer in our evolution and is what sets us apart from other species. This trait, however, has changed rapidly in the past few decades. The internet and its offspring in the form of social media platforms have facilitated a different kind of connection, at least in the initial days of adoption. I remember the early 2010s when I would come back from school and hop on to Facebook only to chat with my school friends again - even those who stayed next door. To be fair, it also helped me connect with distant relatives and random friends whom I met at the summer camp and wouldn’t have been able to connect with otherwise. Cut to 2022, where I need to take regular ‘detox’ breaks from these platforms to stay sane - times have clearly changed, communication has clearly evolved.
If you think of it, very few of us could have envisaged Facebook in its early days, as it stands today. Perhaps, even Zuckerberg would second this. The company’s vision statement from 2004 reads “The Facebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges”. It has obviously gone beyond colleges today, but even on the whole connecting people mission, how successful has facebook really been? A world without social media is hard to imagine but a large part of modern-day problems related to societal rifts can ironically be attributed to social media. Platforms that were meant to foster human bondings have turned into engines of hate and misinformation. Instead of connecting people, these platforms have reduced our interpersonal connections and skills by gluing us to our screens for the better part of our days. Spaces that could have been used for civilized debates and discussions have become echo chambers that produce spiteful individuals with little patience for counter-views. Giving credit where due, social media has been instrumental in spreading liberal ideas, uplifting the marginalized communities, creating safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ and other disenfranchised groups but these are also the very same people who are the most vulnerable to the harms of social media.
But did it have to be so? Would it have been possible for these platforms to retain all the goods while eliminating all the harms? Is there a way, the human-generated algorithms that primarily run these platforms, could have been tweaked so as to protect people instead of pushing them into vicious addictive cycles of social media use? Turns out, the answer is yes!
In October 2021, a former Facebook employee and (now a whistleblower) Frances Haugen, testified before a U.S. Senate committee, accusing the company of ignoring potential harm caused by its social media platforms. She claims that Facebook along with Instagram causes harm to children, divides societies, and meddles with elections, undermining democracy. These revelations did not come across as a surprise. Facebook has had a history of scandals be it related to the 2016 US elections or the scandalous Cambridge Analytica case, where user data was laxly handled. Its effects on teenagers’ mental health and unhealthy body image issues have been experienced firsthand by a majority of its users. But what’s concerning in this whole episode is how a company puts its own growth and revenue before the whole of society. In an effort to gain more screen time (and hence more ad revenue) against its competitors, hateful and radical content that garners more attention is dished out to us with little thought given to its overall long-term impacts. Big corporations acting irresponsibly is no news but when a corporation, as giant, prominent, and indispensable as Facebook, starts to act rogue, we need to be worried.
Within days of Haugen’s testimony, Facebook managed to save its face, yet again, by diverting all the attention elsewhere - the Metaverse. By renaming itself to Meta, the company managed to defer a stock price plunge at a point where its daily user base is plateauing and competitors such as TikTok are taking up screen time-share. With increasing government scrutiny and public backlash alongside Apple’s privacy policy modification, the rebranding effort has probably avoided a bigger plunge than what we witnessed on Wednesday. Regardless of what was the motivation behind the rebranding and the timing, it has surely garnered interest in the metaverse.
Now I’m no irrational naysayer but something about Facebook leading us into the metaverse is making me sick. The concept surely has a lot of potential for various stakeholders. From serving as an interface for Web 3 to creating a whole new platform for creators, artists, and businesses that cannot even be thought of, metaverse will most likely be a game-changer in human interaction but it also comes with a fair and perhaps disproportionate share of problems. Imagine wearing a VR headset and walking into a virtual street full of hate-spewing faceless trolls. Imagine being forced to watch and interact with a dozen adverts before you are allowed to get into a virtual meet. Imagine unregulated metaverses and gated virtual colonies, equivalents of closed Facebook groups, that’ll become engines of hate and discrimination. The possibilities are endless. While the metaverse, as a concept, is not inherently bad, it definitely holds significant potential to cause harm, and Facebook or Meta controlling it is anything but reassuring.
About the Creator
Rishi Rathi
Musing over sustainability and impact and ways to make the world better than we inherited. I'm learning while I write and I want your opinions on my stories.
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