Text/Yan Chen
Edit/Gale
At the end of 2021, Zuckerberg may be a little prickly.
Recently, the veteran American magazine New Republic named the Facebook founder the magazine's "Villain of the Year" and called him the "stupid founder" who created "the world's worst and most destructive website."
Not long ago, Yahoo Finance made a "worst company of the year" network selection, Facebook's parent company Meta topped the list, with more than 50% of the votes, becoming the "worst company in 2021".
Screenshot of Yahoo Finance
In the second half of this year, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook changed its name to Meta and officially established Metacosm, a move that set off a new boom in the concept of metacosm around the world, but also faced controversy.
In the eyes of the outside world, Facebook's change of name to Meta is nothing more than Zuckerberg's way of avoiding public criticism. Facebook has long been criticized for manipulating public opinion and leaking privacy. Today, the evaluation of "the worst company of the year for the evil guys" may be the concentrated outbreak of long-standing dissatisfaction with Zuckerberg and the companies behind him.
Over the years, Zuckerberg and Facebook have repeatedly rushed to the news because of scandals, and Zuckerberg's image has plummeted. From the much-to-talked about Harvard talent, the youngest billionaire in Silicon Valley, to now being called an AI robot and "evil man of the year", Zuckerberg is gone on the road of "black and red".
The moral image of the tall building collapsed violently
Zuckerberg will surely remember 2018 fondly.
That year was Facebook's darkest year and the beginning of Zuckerberg's meteoric decline.
In March of that year, the "Facebook Data Leak Gate Incident" that shocked the world broke out. Some media outlets have exposed the information of more than 50 million users on Facebook being sold to the political data company Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge. As the incident escalated, Facebook's chief technology officer said about 87 million users were affected by the data breach, most of them in the United States.
The leaked user data even affected the 2016 U.S. presidential election. During the election, Cambridge Analytica provided the Trump camp with detailed data on U.S. voters and used Facebook's biased algorithms to target ads to users. The president of Cambridge Analytica has said that it was the use of such technology that allowed Trump to finally succeed in defeating Hillary Clinton.
The scandal caused public anger among netizens, and also made Zuckerberg walk into the congressional hearing twice and accept 10 hours of "torture". Zuckerberg admits that Facebook has made a number of mistakes over the past few years.
At the same time, during the hearing, what made netizens even more happy was the discussion about whether Zuckerberg is a robot. In the face of the senator's questioning, Zuckerberg acted extremely cold and serious, pretending to drink water and showing a stylized smile. Netizens' arguments about Zuckerberg's "being human and not human" also hinted that his image began to collapse.
In addition to this, over the years, Facebook has gradually acquired popular apps such as WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. At present, four of the top five apps in the world are from the "Facebook family". Since 2019, antitrust investigations against Facebook have been launched across the United States. Last December, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from 48 states and territories jointly filed two separate antitrust lawsuits against Facebook and asked a judge to order Facebook to split its Instagram and WhatsApp businesses.
Although the lawsuit was eventually dismissed, Facebook's use of its dominant position and monopoly power to suppress weak competitors and stifle competition was exposed to the public eye. Zuckerberg, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created the "American Dream," has also become a notorious industry bully.
What really dealt Zuckerberg and Facebook a fatal blow was the allegations of former Facebook employee Francis Haugegan.
Former Facebook employee Francis Haugegan
In October, Haugen accused Facebook of harming the physical and mental health of teenagers, fomenting division and weakening American democracy. She exposed several internal documents to the media, exposing Facebook's disregard for public safety as a matter of profit. For a moment, the crowd was in an uproar.
Haugen said that for the sake of traffic, Facebook uses algorithms to let users see more content that can cause anger, inspire fear, and incite hatred. It also proactively shut down the "reduce fake news" security system and allowed fake news to run rampant.
In addition, Facebook's Instagram has a huge negative impact on the physical and mental health of teenagers, causing them to fall into anxiety, suffer from eating disorders, and even commit suicide. Data from an internal study cited by Haugeen showed that 13.5 percent of teenage girls said INS made suicidal thoughts more intense, and 17 percent thought INS worsened eating disorders.
In a dramatic scene, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were massively paralyzed the day before Haugeen attended the congressional hearings, with nearly six hours of downtime and 2.9 billion users worldwide affected. As a result, Facebook's stock price plummeted 6% intraday, and Zuckerberg's personal wealth evaporated more than $6 billion in a single day.
Everything seemed to be providential, Facebook's fig leaf was torn down, and the ugliness underneath was "publicly executed".
Oshiho "Former Universe"
Although the Facebook scandal is rife, it has not stopped Zuckerberg from chasing investment hotspots.
On October 28 of this year, Zuckerberg announced that it would officially rename Facebook to Meta, while changing the company's icon, while the original Facebook was downgraded to a subsidiary of Meta, alongside Instagram and WhatsApp.
The word Meta is derived from the MetaVerse. Zuckerberg said that the metacosm will inherit the mobile Internet and become mainstream in the next 5 to 10 years. From now on, Meta will take precedence over metaverses, and social networks are a thing of the past.
In Zuckerberg's vision, the metacosm will merge multiple fields such as games, work, social networking, and education. Every user can swim in the metaverse as long as they wear a headset, and VR will also be incorporated into the metaverse universal computing platform, just like today's smartphones and laptops.
Over the past few years, Facebook has continued to invest in hardware facilities. Facebook's third quarter report revealed that AR and VR will be a key part of its strategy for the next few years, spending about $10 billion over the next year to develop the technology needed to build the metacosm, and this investment will continue in the short term.
At present, many people in the industry say that the metaverse proposed by Meta is still just a concept, and at the current level of technology, it is still far from the realization of the metacosm. In fact, at present, the concept of "metaverse" in the industry is still controversial and unclear. But what is certain is that Zuckerberg needs a lot of technical support, a huge user volume and an ecological environment if he wants to realize his metaverse concept, which may be difficult to achieve by Meta alone.
The huge investment in the metaverse may not be able to get the corresponding output. No one is currently sure whether some of the functions of the virtual world are necessary. Bank of America analyst Justin Post said Facebook could make a huge investment of more than $50 billion before the metacosm project reaches breakeven. Due to the large investment, some investors may consider the metacosmity project to be worth negative.
Some tech giants have also been reluctant to look at the metaverse. In an interview in September, Cook rejected the "metacosm" claim and said he would "stay away from those buzzwords." Recently, Musk has publicly expressed his disdain for the "metaverse". He described the incident as "shaking a screen in front of my face all day" and even joked: "When I was a child, my mother always told me not to get too close to the TV..."
But despite the outside world's voices, Zuckerberg still bet on the "metacosm". And it's constantly trying.
The "Sword of Damocles" of Ethics
In 2018, Facebook released three different types of social apps in an attempt to cultivate users' VR social habits. In December, Meta launched a VR social app called Horizon Worlds, which is open to users over the age of 18. Users can appear in highly customized digital avatars to meet others and play games.
Meta has built a certain degree of "virtual community" Horizon Worlds at the moment, but until the relevant regulations and boundaries are clear, Meta's "virtual world" is still controversial.
Not long ago, during the Horizon Worlds test, an unfortunate thing happened.
One day, a female user was walking alone in the square of Horizon Worlds, while a strange man quietly followed and reached out to "touch" her.
Afterwards, the female user said that "this (uncomfortable) feeling is more intense than being harassed on the Internet." Even more infuriating is the fact that when sexual harassment occurred, users who were also at Horizon Worlds did not give any help, but instead watched and supported, which made her feel isolated.
Meta has conducted an internal review of the matter. The staff said they set up a tool called "safe zone" in the app, and once activated, the user was untouchable, avoiding sexual harassment from the "physical level". However, this method is too simple and crude to convince the public.
The gap in legislative supervision is the real cloud above the metacosm.
In the imagination, the "metacosm" must be a more complex "virtual social world" than the current graphics, videos, live broadcasts and other forms, and the virtual value has greatly increased. But giving a company control over virtual property, resources, and information for a large number of users is undoubtedly a very risky thing.
As more and more people move from real life to digital life, the human economic chain will also be fully integrated into the metaverse, and at that time, tech giants like Zuckerberg will become the leaders of the virtual world and have supreme power. Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor, said he doesn't believe Zuckerberg wouldn't abuse his power in the metaverse.
Source: The Matrix movie
Therefore, the metaverse brought about by technological progress may not necessarily make human life better. The highly controlled virtual worlds of The Matrix and the depressed real deserts are a warning of technological optimism. In the face of absolute power and resources, no one can guarantee that they will not become a "tyrant". Moreover, Zuckerberg's current management of the social product Facebook has been criticized by the outside world.