Meta was rated as the worst company of the year in the annual Yahoo Finance survey. Yahoo Finance evaluates performance and achievement and selects the Compay of the Year each year. This year, Microsoft won the title with a $2 trillion market capitalization mark and a 53% surge in its stock price. 1541 respondents, however, rated Meta/Facebook unfavorably.
Facebook has been in the midst of a range of controversies this year from the Facebook Whistleblower outing the company's safety issues and, other antitrust allegations. Moreover, critics of the company have claimed that they felt their voice was being taken away and over-policed on the social media platform.
The company was also blamed for allowing the spread of misinformation this year, especially during the spread of Covid 19, and promoting far-right extremism and undermining democracy. Critics have also been concerned about the social platform's effect on young kids and teens, especially Instagram's effects on younger teens' mental health.
In the survey, the company received 50% more votes than the company which finished second-last, Alibaba. However, around 30% of the respondents also said the company could redeem itself from that title if it apologizes and acknowledges all it has done.
One critic responded that the company could earn redemption by donating a sizeable amount of its profits to a foundation to reverse the damage and harm done. Angry investors filling the survey suggested raising its stock prices as payment for redemption.
The reasons for this outcome are not hard to understand, as this was easily the worst year in Facebook history as far as its public perception is concerned. First, there was a whistleblower who gave a trove of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal and also testified before Congress in order to shed some light on the company’s business practices. The former employee, Frances Haugen, revealed a number of questionable practices, such as the fact that the platform’s algorithm is designed to promote divisive content since it increases engagement, and that the company was targeting tweens because it saw them as a “valuable but untapped audience.”
As if all that wasn’t enough, Haugen also revealed the company has been lying about its shrinking user base to investors, and that it was also trying to figure out ways to target kids as young as six years old to compensate for teens leaving its platform for other social media apps. It also banned a developer who created a plug-in that removed users’ newsfeeds to prevent endless doom scrolling and shuttered an internal research team that was studying social media addiction on its platform.
Given this context, it’s not a surprise that after all this was revealed, the company suddenly announced it was changing its name to Meta, but even that was widely mocked as the reveal videos were as corny as squirrel feces. Whether or not Facebook/Meta will be able to change its public perception is something we’ll have to discover in 2022, but given how many companies have expressed interest in the Metaverse Zuckerberg wants to create, it’s not a foregone conclusion that they will win this “award” again next year. And to be fair to Facebook/Meta, at least it’s not offering Facebook and Instagram users NFTs, yet.
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