Facebook needs to do more than change its name to Meta

Social media behemoth Facebook will need to do much more than change its name if it’s to win back the trust of its users – and regulators – with some major soul searching needed after years of scandals and abuses of customer loyalty.

Facebook on Friday announced a name change to Meta – a signal that it wants to focus on the future, rather than its chequered past.

But despite all the tech demos, the hype and buzzwords – and there were a lot of them – we have little reason to take Facebook at its word that the changes will amount to anything beyond the surface-level.

To date, the company and its top leadership haven’t yet demonstrated that they grasp or appreciate the sheer scale of their responsibilities, or the degree to which they’ve repeatedly failed to meet them.

Some of what Meta showed off on Friday is genuinely exciting but it needs to do a lot more than a name change to win back trust. Picture: Michael Nagle

Facebook, now Meta, has billions of users across the globe – more than half of the world’s population regularly use its services – yet it has repeatedly shown that it prioritises rampant growth and profits over its users’ mental health and overall wellbeing.

It hoovers up our personal data, encourages smartphone addiction through ‘likes’ and other engagement metrics, and lets misinformation largely run rampant on its platform.

The company grew from a small campus project led by Mark Zuckerberg designed to rate how ‘hot or not’ his college classmates were, and time and time again has not matured at the same time as its rampant growth.

When faced with damning testimony from an ex-Facebook whistleblower this month – the incredibly brave Frances Haugen – Facebook declined to release the internal research that went to the heart of her claims, instead smearing Ms Haugen’s character and refusing to apologise for harming the mental health of some of its young female users.

The company has also shown it has learned little from its biggest ever failing – the Cambridge Analytica data scandal – in which personal data belonging to millions of users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica without their consent. Cambridge Analytica then used the data to provide analytical assistance to the 2016 US presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced the parent company's name is being changed to "Meta" to represent a future beyond just its troubled social network. Picture: Chris Delmas

And look at the company’s childish reaction to Australia’s impending mandatory media bargaining code legislation, which was to simply shut down news for days on end, cutting off vital access to news about bushfires and other disasters, while also shutting down the local pages for health departments and charities who got caught in the crossfire.

Some of what Meta showed off on Friday is genuinely exciting – virtual reality is somewhere we’ll be spending a lot of time in the decades to come, and land and sea barriers will no longer stop us from hanging out with friends or ‘travelling’ overseas to check out new locales. Video games are much more immersive in virtual reality, and augmented reality will help blend the physical world with the virtual in fascinating ways.

But the big question is whether Meta is the right company to be building that vision.

I’ve been a visitor to Facebook’s Silicon Valley campus on multiple occasions, and its employees aren’t bad people.

They are excited by Facebook’s ambitions, and to be changing the world through what they perceive as a company doing good.

But they also often fail to see the bigger picture, including the very real downsides of how addictive and toxic social media can be, particularly for our most vulnerable.

For real change to happen at Facebook, that might mean change at the top, including the departure of co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

It might mean stronger regulation of ‘Big Tech’, which we’re already starting to see here in Australia.

But, as a minimum, real change will start with some real introspection, and an about-turn that will include prioritising user wellbeing ultimately above profits. And that’s something the company – for all its talk on Friday – has shown no signs of being capable of yet.