Facebook’s whistleblower Frances Haugen called on her former boss Mark Zuckerberg to relinquish leadership of the embattled social media platform and allow for change rather than focus on a new brand.
“I think it is unlikely the company will change if Zuckerberg remains the CEO,” Haugen said Monday at the opening of the Web Summit, a tech fest currently taking place in Lisbon, Portugal.
The world’s largest social media platform, with some 3 billion users, changed its name last week to Meta, in a rebrand aimed at building the “Metaverse,” a shared virtual environment that the tech giant says will take over from the successor to the internet.
Still, early adopters of the metaverse criticized Facebook’s rebranding as a lousy attempt to capitalize on a concept that it did not create to deflect the company from negative publicity.
Haugen told lawmakers in the United States and Britain in October that Facebook would fuel more violent unrest around the world if it did not overhaul its algorithms, which, Haugen said, push divisive content and victimize vulnerable demographics.
The tech giant, which has a two-tier stock structure in which Zuckerberg and an elite group of investors run the company, has responded to Haugen’s allegations by saying the leaked documents were used to paint a “false picture.”