Facebook rebranded itself as Meta in 2021 as a bet on its metaverse, which the company calls the “successor” to the internet. The metaverse relied on Meta’s VR and artificial reality products, though demand never appeared to meet expectations, as the project cost the company about $80 billion. Meta set a goal of reaching 500,000 monthly active users by the end of 2022, but the tally fell below 200,000, the Journal reported, citing internal documents. Meta since scaled down spending on the metaverse and reportedly plans to cut 30% of the project’s budget in 2026 amid a shift to AI. Mike Proulx, research director at market research firm Forrester, told Wired that Meta pivoting from metaverse to AI was the “predicted and inevitable outcome of a big, risky bet that never found an audience.”
Meta has been involved in several regulatory and legal disputes since 2020. That year, the Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust lawsuit against Meta, claiming the company orchestrated a social media monopoly by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp (a federal judge ruled against the FTC in November). A whistleblower complaint in 2021 claimed the company implemented safeguards on Facebook ahead of the 2020 presidential election to prioritize user safety over growth and engagement, but later rolled back those updates, allowing misinformation to spread on the platform. In 2022, Meta was ordered by Irish regulators to pay a €277 million ($319 million) fine for violating privacy standards before later agreeing to pay a $725 million settlement over claims it allowed third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access user data. In May 2023, the European Union issued its largest-ever fine under digital privacy law by ordering Meta to pay €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) for transferring European user data to the U.S.
