Facebook has a new parent company: Meta. It doesn’t really appear to solve the core problems, though.
Over the last several years, Facebook really has shown to be just one long string of problems. This ranges from managerial aspects to legal to privacy, the company has really become one large hot mess to put it mildly.
Of course, Facebook owns a lot. This includes Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus to name a few. Often, for a number of critics, this is a reason to break the company up because of the overpowering nature of the company. Facebook, however, made the decision to form one parent company, Meta. This under the guise of building on the “metaverse”.
The move, is very similar to when Google created the parent company, Alphabet Inc. in 2015 to oversee their various operations. From our perspective, this is just the founder’s way of following in Google’s footsteps.
What some observers see this as is a way for Facebook to simply change the channel from it’s massive image problem. So many critics consider Facebook a cancer to democracy and health. The thing is is that what Facebook is facing goes well beyond an image problem. There are plenty of legal problems the company is facing all over the world. By adding a parent company, it doesn’t necessarily make the legal problems go away. Those liabilities still exist. The only thing this might serve is to add a complication of holding Facebook accountable from a liability standpoint. Still, if something happened prior to the formation of said parent company, that liability will still exist as if there wasn’t that parent company.
Even if Facebook is simply becoming a subsidiary of a larger parent company, those image problems remain. So, it’s difficult to really see these problems just magically going away. In fact, if the site continues to be run in the same way as it is now, there will no doubt be even more problems in the future.
At the end of the day, while it is certainly an interesting story that there is some corporate restructuring going on within Facebook, to some degree, it’s generally an exercise in moving the deck chairs. The only thing that really changes is that Meta will get added to the list of disliked names among critics. This assuming there isn’t something we are missing in all of this.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
