Before the turn on the metaverse, then the name change. Then again, the disappointing results of the last quarter of 2021. Meta, what we called Facebook until last October, is an evolving company. An evolution provoked, some say, by Apple’s new policies, from the competition of TikTok and from all the controversies about disinformation and the so-called Facebook Files. Whatever the reason, it is a multinational that is profoundly changing.
The mutation doesn’t just have to do with services, functionalities, business strategies. For example, now those who work in Meta are called Metamate, the new formula decided by Mark Zuckerberg to identify the company’s employees. No more Facebookers: the name of what is still the most popular social network in the world today almost completely disappears.
First in an internal meeting and then in a Facebook post, Zuckerberg explained the new course to employees. The controversy and the transition from Facebook to Meta have also had strong repercussions on the sense of belonging of those who work for the Menlo Park company. In an early February investigation, the New York Times recounted the doubts of the engineers who, overnight, were transferred from Instagram to the newborn team dedicated to virtual and augmented reality.
So here’s why Zuckerberg decided to talk to the whole company, to share the new goals and to change the slogans that have characterized the identity of the social network right from the start.
Interview
Behind the scenes of social media: how to become a creator, how to learn, how much you earn
by Emanuele Capone
The history of Meta through the new slogans
“Be bold”, read one of the phrases, the daughter of an incredible story, which began in a Harvard dormitory and passed through a house in San Francisco, all the way to the world. “Focus on impact” was another of the slogans. Both of them no longer exist. They have been replaced by “Live in the future”, “Build great things” and “Focus on long-term impact”.
Three sentences that, read in sequence, tell a story. The story of a new course, and if we want a bet too. The metaverse, the project that Zuckerberg announced last summer in an interview with Casey Newton, is a long journey, still embryonic and distant in time. How do you imagine it? Living in the future, for example.
To build the metaverse, the CEO of Meta had to make a bet, start over to think, as suggested by a Reuters article, like a startupper. And whoever invents something new has the goal of “building exceptional things”, even by investing 10 billion dollars on an idea, as Facebook did with the metaverse.
When building something new, it’s not enough to think about the immediate impact of that specific technology. It is important to think in the long term, on all those unexpected consequences that Facebook has come to know in the years since leader in the social network market. After all, imagine if someone had told the young Zuckerberg who was busy transferring the Harvard yearbook to the then Facemashwhich a decade later its platform would play a controversial role in the US presidential election.
There are still two other slogans, small evolutions of what already existed: “Move fast and break conventions” (the famous Californian “break things”) becomes “Let’s move together quickly”, testifying to the desire to affirm a new focus on the effects of technology on society. Again: “Be open” changes to “Be direct and respect your colleagues”, an invitation that Zuckerberg hopes employees will pick up, especially after the distrust caused by the revelations of the whistleblower Frances Haugen.
There is still an element in the story. An element that does not have to do directly with slogans, but with a product, perhaps the most famous of Facebook. Also the News Feedthe Facebook homepage where at each access we see updates from friends and pages that we follow managed by the algorithm, change name. And it becomes Feed and that’s iteliminating the dimension of news, and political information, which has caused so much trouble for Zuckerberg in recent years.
Social network
How Meta’s artificial intelligence works to detect fake news
by Francesco Marino
New goal, old problems
In short, the new Meta will be, in Zuckerberg’s intentions, a company looking towards the future, aiming at the construction of new objects, innovations, with a look at the long-term impact. What is not known at the moment is how these indications will translate in the real world, in the products that Meta makes available to the public.
For example: Horizon Worlds, the group’s first virtual reality social network, has already had a number of problems, the latest of which with harassment, after the latest story told by researcher Nina Jane Patel. Meta had not foreseen the possibility of protecting itself from the unwanted attention of other users, made even more pervasive by the sensation of presence offered by virtual reality. In short, the road to attention to the long-term impact of products, as per the slogan, still seems long.