How many ex-es before Facebook goes ex-tinct?
Facebook has left a string of sad, angry or mystified ex-es behind. Even Facebook is no longer Facebook, but Meta, the entity which wants to dominate the Metaverse.
Part of the cause of the renaming exercise was the stream of bad news about despicable behavior around privacy. Facebook was targeting kids and experimenting with users’ emotions. It also became a target of Apple, which is positioning itself as the privacy guardian.
Even if it doesn't make the headlines much these days, governments are still slowly moving against Facebook. You can change name and logo, but the issues are not going away. WhatsApp has until the end of February to clarify privacy policy changes, the EU says.
Facebook has tried to use technology to remove all of its questionable content. They’ve hired thousands of people, but it made very little progress. You can't fix a system which is inherently bad by throwing more technology at it. Sometimes the effort has been more symbolic than real. When real attempts at transparency were made, Facebook shut them down, as in this story: Meta pauses new users from joining analytics tool CrowdTangle.
The objective for Facebook from the beginning was to own its users and to know everything about them. Then it was selling this information to the highest bidder. Eventually even that was not enough and Facebook wanted to also extract money from its users. In fact, I noted in 2015 that it sure looked like Facebook was taking steps to dominate the world.
In late 2016, it obtained a banking license in Ireland and started planning to become the bank of Facebook. Just imagine: it would know everything about you, including how much money you have.
But banking has one major problem. It is heavily regulated around the world and regulation is not something which Facebook likes much. That's why in 2017, Facebook started working on its own blockchain digital currency, Libra.
In 2019 it was officially announced and immediately denounced by many governments around the world. Facebook tried to lure big financial organizations, including all the credit card companies. These companies like money very much, but they don't like to be associated with toxic news. PayPal, eBay, Mastercard, Stripe, Visa, Mercado Pago and Booking Holdings left before they officially joined. An attempt to please regulators with a name change to Diem and narrowing the scope of how it would be deployed didn't help. The governments and regulators don't like and don't trust Facebook.
That's why Facebook has a new ex to add to its list. It has decided to close the cryptocurrency venture and sell the assets.
Facebook is using its billions of dollars to remake itself into a new entity and move to the Metaverse. In that digital landscape, there will be little oversight for it. In that environment, Facebook hopes to control people even more than before.
What Facebook hasn't done is to start building technology which would provide value and help people in their lives. Its new effort is doomed the same way as its digital currency. And that’s the (toxic) recurrent pattern.