Hey there --

Ahead of Thanksgiving this week, we wanted to first say thank you. We’re so incredibly grateful for your support and we couldn’t take on Big Tech monopolies like Facebook without your help.

A lot has happened recently with Facebook. It’s likely to come up at the Thanksgiving table this year, so we created this handy guide to help walk your relatives through the latest common questions about Facebook:

Who was that recent whistleblower?

• Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, came forward this fall with thousands of internal documents from Facebook detailing the company’s profound societal harm across the world.
• Her leak of internal documents, called the Facebook Papers, show how the company knowingly harms the mental health of kids, facilitates human trafficking, accelerates political polarization, and spurs ethnic violence around the world.

Why did Facebook change its name?

• Given all the press around the recent whistleblower and Facebook Papers, Facebook changed their name to “Meta” to distract and deflect from the latest revelations about the company’s willful proliferation of disinformation, violence, hate, and extremism around the world.
• In the future, Facebook plans on expanding into the “Metaverse,” where users can create avatars, host meetings, and connect with others in virtual reality.

What is the metaverse?

• The metaverse is a virtual reality that Facebook is creating to immerse users in 3-D digital worlds. But just like the rest of Facebook, it’s all about profit. By creating the metaverse, Facebook will be able to continue to addict users and extract our personal data with manipulative tools under the guise of fancy new technology.
• One day, Facebook users can live out Mark Zuckerberg’s sci-fi dreams and attend meetings in the metaverse. Have you ever wanted to hold meetings in virtual reality? Neither have we.

Why is everyone mad at Mark Zuckerberg?

• Instead of taking accountability for hate speech, misinformation, genocide, harms to kids’ mental health, and human trafficking that happens on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg continues to praise his platform for their content moderation and transparency.
• The metaverse is as ridiculous as it sounds, but it’s a perfect distraction from the international outcry over violence stemming from their platform.

Together, we can put a stop to Facebook’s toxic business model that proliferates off surveillance and hate, but only if we have the facts first. It cannot be overstated how grateful we are for your support. Hope this guide helps you come prepared to the Thanksgiving table.

Have a lovely and restful start to the holiday season,

Nicole

Nicole Gill
Co-founder & Executive Director
Accountable Tech