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Never Ask Why
The logic of Facebook is the logic of data. No wonder it’s so inhuman.
It is admittedly difficult to know exactly what to make of all the latest news about Facebook — or Meta, as it’s now known. It would be too dismissive to say that nothing we’ve learned about Facebook in the last few weeks is news. There is plenty of it, even if most of what we’ve heard is familiar. Instagram makes people, particularly young girls, feel worse about themselves? Of course. Facebook struggles to moderate content properly in countries like India? Sounds right. The company’s platforms are rife with accounts created for human trafficking? I believe it. And on and on. No surprises here.
It still seems like an open question whether Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the top-level executives at Facebook — sorry, Meta — are fully cognisant of the environment in which these details have been released. And if they are, it doesn’t seem they totally care. “I know that some people will say that this isn’t a time to focus on the future. And I want to acknowledge that there are important issues to work on in the present. There always will be,” Zuckerberg said during his unveiling of Meta’s metaverse platform this past week. “So for many people, I’m just not sure there ever will be a good time to focus on the future.”
