To say that Facebook has had a difficult month would be an understatement. The company, which has become synonymous with everything wrong with the internet, has been here before with the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the countless string of revelations regarding a litany of failures. In the midst of its latest, and perhaps defining, crisis, it announced in a series of bizarre videos by its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook will be renamed Meta Platforms Inc., an umbrella company which owns the “family” of products including Facebook the platform, Instagram, and WhatsApp, with a vision to expand into virtual reality technologies.

This change comes in the backdrop of the Facebook Papers, a trove of leaked documents by former employee and whistle-blower that paint a bleak picture of the crisis the company is facing. It is becoming increasingly obvious that Facebook is ill-equipped to face the foremost challenges of our present-day era: the ubiquity of misinformation/ disinformation, content moderation of dangerous speech fuelled a far-right surge across the world, protection of vulnerable segments of society and the challenges that inhere with running a truly global company. Whistleblower Frances Haugen makes the case for the state to step in and take charge of the problems Facebook is currently firefighting or has abdicated on.

Amidst these worrying findings, the gimmickry of the Metaverse, a moniker for Zuckerberg’s vision of a ‘virtual reality’, seeks to reorient the company away from its current problems to develop new products. It presents a future for the internet that will move beyond social media and smartphone apps to more immersive experiences through technology. Hastened by the pandemic, it is perhaps easier for many of us to imagine a reality that is entirely virtual where we can work and play. The specifics of Zuckerberg’s vision are murky, mostly because the technology he is promising doesn’t exist as of yet. It seems like the Metaverse will focus on areas such as gaming, work, socialising and entertainment. It is being referred to as a new phase of the internet, a move away from the internet 2.0 defined by social media and mobile phone internet.

It recently came to light that Facebook only spends fourteen percent of its content moderation resources on content from the “rest of the world” as opposed to the bulk, eighty-four percent, in the United States. This has allowed for the proliferation of hate speech and disinformation in countries around the world; fuelled genocide in Myanmar and hate speech against minorities in India.

Instead of tackling the urgent issues it is currently weighed down by, the company seems to have turned into a different lane to sidestep responsibility. It recently came to light that the Facebook spends on sfourteen percent of its content moderation resources on content from the “rest of the world” as opposed to the bulk, eighty-four percent, in the United States. This has allowed for the proliferation of hate speech and disinformation in countries around the world; fuelled genocide in Myanmar and hate speech against minorities in India. This news becomes harder to swallow when we learn that the company will be investing $10 billion on metaverse-related investments just this year.

Facebook is not alone in this vision of technology futures, companies such as Google have been investing in and developing virtual reality technoloy for years. This announcement comes as no surprise as the market for social media apps is plateauing with the only major app in the last few years being TikTok which is not US-based. Additionally, technology companies are catching on to the growing crescendo of public sentiment against them and can see regulators knocking on the door, the pivot could leave both in the lurch as it could take another decade for policymakers to catchup to emerging technologies.

In light of these revelations, one can’t help but see the rebranding of the company cynically as a smokescreen to distract us from holding it accountable. The move is also an indication of the insularity of Silicon Valley and its venerated CEOs. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, inequalities around the world are starker than ever. The promise of social media as ‘the great leveller’ has turned into a nightmare polarising society, endangering lives and extracting immense amounts of data to fatten the pockets of the richest people on the planet. Billionaires investing in space travel and virtual reality are indicative of the fact that they feel no accountability to the material realities of those around them, realities they helped worsen, and are building toys that allow them to escape a planet that is at the brink — environmentally, economically and politically. The underlying sentiment behind the Metaverse is apathy, not innovation or the quest for a better world.

Shmyla Khan is the director of policy and research at Digital Rights Foundation