GoKawiilIn 2021, as a whistleblower emerged with dramatic allegations that Facebook was harming children, CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a rebuttal on Facebook. “We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health. It’s difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives,” he wrote in a note to Meta staff, which he reposted publicly. “At the most basic level, I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.”
Away from the stream of often inane public replies, one reader didn’t like what they saw. Zuckerberg spoke with the unidentified person privately on WhatsApp, according to exhibits later released as part of a series of lawsuits, and the figure urged Zuckerberg — a parent himself — to make child safety even more central in his messaging. “i am not saying facebook is duplicitous and evil,” they wrote. “i am saying the opposite, you have heard the chorus and will PERSONALLY make this issue over adolescents your issue.”
In the privacy of the conversation, Zuckerberg was candid. “I care deeply about this and we’ll continue focusing on being industry-leading with young people,” he responded, “but I’m not going to say it’s my personal main focus when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.”
Zuckerberg later reiterated that “I personally care about this.” But he appeared ambivalent, nudging his conversation partner away from older concerns and toward his vision for the future. “How do you think this fits with our focus on promoting building the metaverse as the next major opportunity?” he asked. “That’s not at odds with safety, but it’s a much different and more innovation-focused message.” Weeks later, Zuckerberg made a huge announcement: The company was changing its name to Meta in honor of its newest, most important priority.
Years after that conversation, online child safety concerns have ballooned — while if anybody’s talking about the Metaverse, it’s likely as a multibillion-dollar money sink where nobody has legs. But the exchange is a microcosm of how Zuckerberg has run Meta, a sprawling online empire worth well over a trillion dollars: by always chasing the next big opportunity. Facebook’s motto was once, famously, “Move fast and break things.” Its new one might be closer to Move fast, break things, move on.
For two decades, Meta’s products have been at the center of what people do online. But Meta now finds itself besieged on all sides. Lawsuits have piled up as regulators turn on social media. A push into smart glasses has triggered a mountain of negative press and backlash — including the pejorative moniker “pervert glasses.” The company remains firmly behind in the AI race. Public perception of Zuckerberg himself has curdled.
Yet Meta is far from finished. It maintains a growing, highly profitable social media business. It’s dominant in AI-powered smart glasses, what many tech leaders consider the next mobile computing platform. It’s defused potential regulatory threats. And its latest platform, a “personal AI agent” dubbed Muse, was released in early September, giving Zuckerberg his next metaverse-like project.
Muse is Zuckerberg’s latest bid to reinvent the company. Early numbers for Muse are promising; an Apptopia estimate this week indicates it’s got over 600,000 daily active users in the US, shooting it to the top of the iOS App Store charts. Yet the question remains: Can a company synonymous with safety and privacy debacles become the AI-powered voice in everyone’s ear?
When Zuckerberg took the stage at Facebook Connect to announce that one of the most recognizable names in tech was getting a new identity, he was planting a flag. Facebook, the social media company known for its “big blue app”? That was the past. The future of the internet was the metaverse, an immersive 3D space where digital avatars could socialize, work, and collaborate, built on a virtual reality headset the company acquired in 2014. And after the covid pandemic’s mass shutdowns of physical space, Facebook believed in the metaverse so much that it would rebuild its entire identity around the niche world of virtual and augmented reality.
But to call Meta’s investment an abandoned boondoggle isn’t quite accurate either. Meta dominates the nascent but growing smart glasses market, perhaps its biggest success story in recent years. The metaverse may not be the future of computing, but its augmented reality ambitions could still pay off.
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