Facebook’s old motto was “move fast and break things.” Boy, is it breaking things now.
In April, Meta rolled out a full-on branding push for Meta AI, launched a standalone AI app, and started pumping out ads about all the amazing things people supposedly can do with their chatbot. Unfortunately for everyone, The Wall Street Journal reports that the bot lets users cosplay being a sexual predator with celebrity voices.
In a statement, Meta called the Journal’s testing “manipulative and unrepresentative of how most users engage with AI companions,” sliding right past the horrific fact that its tool can even fake this. Meta seems to be done apologizing for any consequences of its actions. The short-term PR benefit, however, may set up some long-term risks.
Mastering the pivot, losing the plot
In 2021, Facebook felt stale, and the metaverse was the next big thing. So the company rebranded as Meta. Now, AI is the new hotness, and the metaverse is an afterthought. So Meta’s chasing something new again — but without a clear story, just another pivot. And it’s not just the tech that’s a mess, it’s the narrative.
Ask 10 people what Meta stands for now and you’ll get 12 answers. Facebook ranks sixth on Kantar’s 2025 list of most valuable global brands, but “Meta” is nowhere to be found.
The company has no cohesive story, so it’s running from the old one without landing the new one. That’s narrative risk, something we obsess over as a tech PR agency. (Sterling’s CEO has a lot more to say about this in her PRNEWS byline, “Your Story or Theirs: Why Narrative Risk Now Trumps Brand Risk.”)
‘Metamates’ mock the moniker and message
Neither Wall Street nor investors like messy business narratives. Users and advertisers also struggle to follow along (if they care at all). When Mark Zuckerberg announced “Facebookers” would be called “Metamates,” attempting to piggyback off a naval moniker that most in the US Navy find “patronizing,” employees wondered if they were on a “sinking ship.”
“How is this going to change the company? I don’t understand the messaging,” one engineer wrote in a private chat. “We keep changing the name of everything, and it is confusing.”
Even the professor who coined “metamates” after a request from a Meta employee fell over himself to tell The New York Times, “By the way, I don’t use Facebook and never have. In fact, I avoid all social media.”
Handing out gas cards to pyromaniacs
It’s easy to spot this kind of risk in a small company. Maybe their site is vague. Or sales and marketing are saying different things. Or a single tweet from a customer frames the brand better than the brand can. If they fail to tell their story better, the brand and business may just fade away.
Big companies suffer loudly. Their narratives get distorted, co-opted, or turned into punchlines. And everyone hears about it. Meta, for all its scale, still hasn’t landed a clear story for its AI ambitions. So others are telling it for them — journalists, critics, comedians, Reddit threads.
Meta’s response seems to be the equivalent of handing out free gas cards at support groups for fire-starting fetishists. The cost of a broken narrative isn’t just reputational — it’s ethical. Strategic. Maybe even existential.