Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has bookended the year by winning Worst Company of the Year 2021. As it turns out, the company isn't the only part of Meta to be slated during this year's awards ceremony as CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his own award: ‘Scoundrel of the Year’.
TNR crowns Mark Zuckerberg Scoundrel of the Year
As part of The New Republic's annual awards ceremony, the Meta CEO has finally been awarded for his executive villainy. This year, Zuckerberg has been outed for a variety of uncomfortable behaviour. For example, deals to allow political misinformation and aims to bring pre-teen girls onto the platform despite evidence it harms childrens’ mental health.
For TNR, these negative aspects aren't the only reason why Zuckerberg is being crowned as a scoundrel. In fact, the universally-hated billionaire, who's often been compared to an alien, has been crowned for his relationship to The Metaverse.
“The metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg envisions it is just not a very appealing idea, and only partially because it is Zuckerberg himself explaining it,” the outlet wrote. “The concept that Zuckerberg laid out in a protracted and pyrotechnically cringy presentation seems so thoroughly innocent of any idea of what people actually want to do in their nonvirtual lives, let alone in their virtual ones.”
As we've said in the past, Zuckerberg is pitching himself as the Walt Disney of The Metaverse. The Facebook creator is looking to be the face of the future technology, reinventing his image in the process. However, he’s still universally hated.
Read More: Xbox’s Phil Spencer says Metaverse must revolve around play, not work
Facebook is scummy
Another aspect of Zuckerberg’s award is just due to the negativity towards Facebook. As a whole, TNR writes that Zuckerberg “is a man who got unconscionably rich off the worst website that has ever existed, a website that has broken brains on a scale previously unimaginable in human history”.
However, the outlet says that Facebook isn't an inherently terrible website. It's just the fact that Zuckerberg and the company have continually made negative choices every step of the way. What was once a way of bringing people together in the early 2000s has become a website that turns people against each other.