Nearly four months ago, amid a storm of critical coverage stemming from leaks from a whistleblower, Facebook shifted its strategic focus to building an immersive version of the internet it calls the “metaverse” and changed the company name to Meta.
This week, the company continued with its rebranding campaign. News Feed, for years the centerpiece of Facebook’s user experience and also central to some of its controversies, has been renamed simply Feed. Its employees, formerly known as Facebookers, became Metamates. And its corporate values have also been updated.
The company has introduced guidelines such as “focus on long-term impact” and “be direct and respect your colleagues”. Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of the company, said the changes are necessary because “we are now a metaverse company, building the future of social connection.”
“We’ve already built products that are useful to billions of people, but in our next chapter we’re going to focus more on inspiring people too,” Zuckerberg wrote in an explanation of the new value “Building Awesome Things.”
This week’s changes once again hint at the company’s eagerness to turn the page and reorient its employees, and arguably the general public, into a new era of its business — less tainted by years of controversy.
Zuckerberg himself seems keen to step away from some of the recent turmoil, announcing this week that Nick Clegg, Meta’s former vice president of global affairs and communications, has been promoted to president of global affairs. Clegg’s promotion will free up time for Zuckerberg to focus on the company’s efforts to build new artificial and virtual reality products, Zuckerberg said.
But despite Zuckerberg and Meta’s apparent effort to “live in the future,” as one of their newfound values dictates, the social media giant still has to grapple with many of the same old problems that have plagued it for months, or in some cases , years old. If anything, some of her challenges seem to be getting worse.
Meta’s (FB) advertising core business faces threats from other Big Tech giants. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has filed two new complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission about the company’s handling of misinformation. And the company continues to grapple with regulatory scrutiny.
“At the end of the day, Mark can run, but he can’t hide from regulatory pressure,” said Katie Harbath, a Facebook alum who helped lead the company’s global election efforts until her departure last year.
For a long time, it looked like Zuckerberg and Facebook could at least find some comfort during the company’s various public relations crises in the resilience of their actions. But that is no longer the case. Meta shares are down more than 40% in the past six months, with much of the value lost following a holiday quarter earnings report that showed, among other things, a rare lapse in user growth.
Facebook’s problems continue
While Meta’s announcements this week focus on its vision of a new virtual world, the company’s problems continue to pile up in the real world.
On Friday, the Washington Post broke the news that two new whistleblower complaints against Meta have been filed with the SEC. Andrew Bakaj, attorney for Whistleblower Aid, who filed the complaints, confirmed to CNN Business that they were filed on behalf of Haugen. Haugen is the former Facebook product manager who left the company last May and took with her a collection of internal documents that would later be released to Congress and would inform the box office success of the Facebook Papers that fueled the company’s protracted PR crisis. company.
CNN Business obtained redacted copies of the new SEC complaints as part of a consortium of news organizations from a congressional source, who also provided the internal documents that formed the basis of last year’s Facebook Papers reporting.
The new complaints accuse the company of misleading investors about its efforts to address climate disinformation and Covid-19 on its platforms. They detail how Facebook has repeatedly publicized its efforts to combat misinformation about Covid-19 and climate change, and allege that internal documents indicate that employees were raising concerns both about the ease of access of this content on the platform and about flaws in the company’s efforts to address.
“Some investors will simply not want to invest in a company that does not adequately address this misinformation,” states one of the SEC filings. Haugen previously filed complaints with the SEC against Facebook related to its handling of misinformation about the 2020 presidential election and the January 6 insurrection, human trafficking on its platforms, the effects of its products on teens, and more.
But perhaps the biggest potential problem for Meta to come up this week was an announcement by Google that it plans to develop new privacy measures that would remove the ability to track users in apps and limit the sharing of user data with third parties on Android devices.
The announcement comes after a similar move by Apple (AAPL) had a big impact on Meta’s advertising business, giving users the chance to not be tracked by apps, making it harder for Facebook to target ads.
Meta’s ad business is heavily reliant on small businesses “that rely on the benefits of being able to access a lot of information about users to effectively target advertising… without those details, advertisers won’t pay as much money,” third Bridge Group analyst , Scott Kessler, said. The move at Apple is expected to have a $10 billion impact on Meta results this year.
While Google (GOOG) has hinted that its new privacy-focused advertising system will work differently than Apple’s — and a Meta executive praised Google’s “long-term collaborative approach” to developing it — the change could still be yet another blow to Meta’s main ad.
Building your VR efforts can help. Indeed, Meta and Zuckerberg’s focus on the company’s metaverse ambitions may be an acknowledgment of the fact that their existing businesses are in trouble, Luria said. He noted that Zuckerberg’s updates this week could be a way to communicate, both within the company and externally, “the importance and opportunity of this pivot.”
Meta is working to develop its own tech ecosystem that users will be able to access with their own Quest headsets and where it can run its own app stores, without being at the mercy of the likes of Apple and Google. The problem: The metaverse and the widespread adoption of its related technologies by consumers and advertisers is still years away, so the solution is unlikely to change the fortunes of Meta anytime soon.
Translated matter from CNN Business.
Special credit: Brian Fung.
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