Will Meta solve Facebook’s uncool identity crisis?

If there’s one person that is capable of fusing real life with virtual reality, surely it’s Zuckerberg — the unassuming high-tech billionaire. But why then isn’t Meta the hot topic of conversation? Why aren’t young people talking about how “cool” metaverse is?

Mark Zuckerberg is not the same suited, stoic man that appeared before the US Congress in 2018 and unearthed a new genre of Internet memes. One might think he would be, given that his company has been embroiled in a slew of scandals for some time now.

To make matters worse, an internal memo earlier this year revealed that Facebook is rapidly losing traction among the rising generation, the very audience Zuckerberg attempted to cater to when he invented Facebook as a trailblazing 19-year-old.

Suffice it to say, Zuckerberg must have a lot on his mind. But still, he’s the near-vibrant vision of a tech leader on the verge of a new breakthrough, one that he knows could reinstate his status as an omnipotent force. Ten years from now, we could try on clothes virtually, attend concerts and appear as a hologram at a friend’s house, even if they live on the other side of the planet.

With Facebook’s rebranding as Meta and the company’s shift towards a “metaverse first” outlook, Zuckerberg has said he is reclaiming the dystopian idea presented in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash and moulding it into a utopia.

But nothing about present-day Facebook is utopic. Could a rebrand and new vision save it from the shackles of ongoing missteps and improprieties? For now, it’s a mere distraction. Could this facelift at least earn Facebook a few cool points from young adults and give the company the desperate validation it seeks from a generation accused of doing the same on social media? It seems unlikely.

A character in The Social Network, the 2010 biographical drama about the invention of Facebook, at one point says: “We don’t know what (Facebook) is yet. We just know that it’s cool.” The line strikes a chord — and not because it feels outdated to the person from a generation that has all but given up on Facebook. Rather, the words resonate because this is perhaps how Zuckerberg expects us to receive the metaverse.

But one might be hard-pressed to find a group of teens lounging around the trendiest, most Instagrammable coffee shop and saying these words: “We don’t know what Meta is yet. We just know that it’s cool.”

The idea of an immersive digital space should be more appealing, but for a world that is barely surviving the brutal pummels of misinformation, conspiracy theories and crumbling democracies, the metaverse is the antithesis of Zuckerberg’s paradisiacal ambitions.

But Facebook wasn’t always the supervillain of our lives. In 2011, a year synonymous with the Arab Spring, protesters graffitied a wall near the Ministry of Interior in Tunis with the words: “Thank you, Facebook.” This display of gratitude was an acknowledgement of Facebook’s role in helping activists organise protests and disseminate information.

Maybe we can cut Zuckerberg some slack and assume that this was the vision he always had for Facebook, for the platform to be a force for good and not the debacle that followed. After all, it’s hard to imagine that a 19-year-old intentionally set out to create a billion-dollar company that would one day turn online spaces into weapons, profit from human trafficking and foster suicidal thoughts among teenagers.

A recent Wall Street Journal report alleged that top officials at Facebook knew that Instagram would have a negative impact on teens’ mental health and body image, particularly young girls.

Though Facebook offered one solution by removing the number of likes displayed, the company has, for the most part, downplayed the negatives by promoting Instagram as a positive tool for connecting with peers. The damage control, meek as it might be, makes sense; young people have never gravitated towards Facebook, but now, they’re even abandoning Instagram.

Zuckerberg is essentially Dr Frankenstein and Facebook is the monster of his making. But Facebook’s problems have little to do with what Zuckerberg has created and more about the carelessness involved. Fake news and propaganda are not Zuckerberg’s creations; as a platform owner, he simply failed to address it and let it pass until it called for damage control.

Does Meta have a solution for metastasised misinformation? We do not know, apart from hollow words from Zuckerberg, who says his main focus is to make Meta more people-centric.

In creating the metaverse, the company is “retooling” to make young adults the “North Star”, Zuckerberg has said.

“What I’ve basically told every team is whenever you’re building anything now, whether you’re working on feed ranking or you’re building groups or you’re designing Reels or video or Marketplace, keep in mind especially what’s going to be important to young adults,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Verge.

But what is Meta’s own North Star? Will it be the legacy of Facebook that evoked such condemnation? Maybe his efforts will pay off one day, but for the most part, young people have received the metaverse with scepticism, if not complete disinterest.

The idea is undoubtedly a revolutionary one, and if there’s one person that is capable of fusing real life with virtual reality, surely it’s Zuckerberg — the unassuming high-tech billionaire. But why then isn’t Meta the hot topic of conversation? Why aren’t young people talking about how “cool” metaverse is?

Perhaps it’s just tough to care about something that may fail to care about our well-being.

gopika@khaleejtimes.com