Who would have thought that changing a name would shift how people see a company? Unfortunately, if that was the case for Facebook, it didn’t work out, as an audience survey found that Meta is the worst company of the year.
As it does every year, Yahoo! Finance selects a “Company of the Year” based on its market performance and other achievements while it also selects a “Worst Company of the Year,” polling its audience about the company that upset them the most.
While one could say that these are different metrics, there are a lot of reasons why Facebook got this title as the worst company of the year. Yahoo! Finances said that while Robinhood, Nikola, and other companies appeared in this survey in which 1,541 readers responded, Facebook was the one that received the most write-in votes with 8%.
What is especially interesting about the Company Formerly Known as Facebook is just how many and varied the reasons people dislike it. It received 50% more votes than the second-place finisher, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, not for one singular offense but for a litany of grievances from groups of people that may have little else to agree about.
One of the reasons that so many people got furious about Facebook/Meta was the company’s effects on children and young people, something we’ve covered a lot lately regarding the Instagram controversy.
Even though it seems that Facebook could redeem itself as around 30% of Yahoo! readers think that.
One respondent said Facebook could redeem itself by acknowledging and apologizing for what it did and donating a “sizable amount” of its profits for a foundation to help reverse its harm. While some people saw the Meta rebrand as a cynical attempt to change the conversation, following Don Draper’s advice in scandal, others were excited by the potential of a new direction that could a) be interesting and b) something different from the aging social media model. A significant amount of responses focused on executives and founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Do you think Facebook/Meta deserves this title as the worst company of the year? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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