Source: The Verge
Meta is attempting a rebrand away from child safety failures, antitrust battles, and leadership questions by emphasizing the metaverse and AI, but consumer skepticism runs deeper than new product categories address. The company faces a structural problem: younger audiences have formative memories of Facebook as their parents' platform, while older Gen X and millennial users carry active resentment about privacy violations and algorithmic harms. Demographic-wide forgetting is unlikely. Meta's real leverage isn't messaging—it's network effects. Users stay because their social graph is locked in, not because they've absolved the company of past conduct.