Facebook is expected to change its name this week. Not the social network, but the group headed by Mark Zuckerberg, which also includes Instagram, Whatsapp and Oculus. Apparently this is an operation no different from what Google did a few years ago, when it decided that the name – the umbrella company – of all the different activities of the group – starting with YouTube to get to Android – would be Alphabet (although everyone continues to call it a “Google group”). In reality, the name change for Facebook comes at the most difficult moment in its history. For a month, a major American newspaper has been publishing the contents of tens of thousands of internal documents in installments that essentially demonstrate two things: the first, Mark Zuckerberg is perfectly aware of the damage that his social networks do every day to people and more generally. to democracy; the second, he is aware of it because he is warned by his collaborators, yet he does nothing, on the contrary he always publicly denies to defend the profit. From a reputational point of view, the current crisis is in disaster (and today the repentant executive Frances Haugen continues her tour testifying to the British parliament). Which makes several observers say that Facebook is already dead as a brand. The group, on the other hand, continues to grow. Several billion users use its services every day. As we saw a few weeks ago when suddenly, and for many hours, they stopped working, with an impact on the lives of many by no means trivial.
Yet to get out of this scandal, triggered by the revelations of repentant leaders, it is not enough simply to change your name. To regain credibility, a more concrete change is needed: according to many, Mark Zuckerberg’s step backwards is needed. Perhaps, to save the empire he built, the founder’s best choice could be to hand over as Bill Gates did at one point with Microsoft.
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