On 28 October, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was rebranding as Meta. The timing was likely a public relations strategy to end the tech giant’s downward trend.
Over the past year the $1trn company has faced congressional antitrust hearings, and damning whistleblower testimonies from ex-employee Frances Haugen revealing (amongst other disclosures) how the company knew but failed to act on the platforms role in advancing teenagers’ self esteem issues and the amplification of hate speech and misinformation in the Global South.
With the Meta launch and the announcement of a virtual reality online space called the metaverse, Zuckerberg is now attempting to redirect attention away from this public scrutiny and into a world that does not exist and where nobody has been harmed – yet.
