Is there any way to fix Facebook?

On a recent episode of The Marketing Companion podcast, I had a wee bit of a breakdown. I’m so tired of hearing about Facebook’s endless and deeply disturbing problems that I don’t even want to talk about it any more!

Facebook has been in crisis mode since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. Still, the company that started as a dorm-room project and now has more than 3.5 billion people using at least one of its apps monthly has proved to be financially resilient with a market value not far from $1 trillion.

But now thousands of pages of internal documents provided to Congress by former employee Frances Haugen depict a company where data on the harms it causes are abundant and solutions are ignored.

The papers reveal that even Facebook’s own employees agonize over the fact that its central algorithms reward outrage, hatred, and viral clickbait, while its content moderation systems are deeply inadequate. Haugen claims Facebook is “stuck in a feedback loop that they can’t get out of.”

Backed into a corner with hard evidence from the leaked documents, Facebook has doubled down defending its choices rather than fixing its problems. A name change, promises of a metaverse, and aggressive advertising are meant to distract us from the issue. Meanwhile, the company has shed nearly $200 billion in market value in…