Facebook announces a meaningless roster of ‘new values’

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has informed his employees they are now called Metamates, that it’s time for a new cultural operating system at Meta, and more miscellaneous corporate dribble.

An announcement of Facebook/Meta’s fresh set of ‘values’ was apparently initially delivered to Facebook employees at an all hands meeting, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has published a Facebook post (who does that anymore?) detailing his thoughts to the rest of us.

“We wrote our current company values back in 2007,” explained Zuckerberg. “They have been remarkably durable, but a lot has changed during this time. We are now a distributed company. We have a global community and wide-reaching impact. And we’re now a metaverse company, building the future of social connection.”

Straight off the bat, it’s jarring to hear something as flimsy as ‘company values’ discussed like it’s a product range, but that’s modern corporate jargon for you.

“Now is the right time to update our values and our cultural operating system,” he continued. “I’ve always believed that in order for values to be useful, they need to be ideas that good companies can reasonably disagree with or emphasize differently. By working at Meta, we commit to applying these values to our work every day. I think these values capture how we must act as a company to bring our vision to life.

The new values are listed as: Move Fast, Focus on Long Term Impact, Build Awesome Things, Be Direct and Respect Your Colleagues, and Meta, Metamates, Me.

If you’re interested in reading the exact wording around all these terms head over to the post, but the final one is what has been getting the most chuckles from commentators. Meta, Metamates, Me appears to be a reference to a naval phrase ‘Ship, Shipmates, Self’ – a list of things that are supposed to be your priority in descending order. If you’re a pirate, or something.

“Meta, Metamates, Me is about being good stewards of our company and mission. It’s about the sense of responsibility we have for our collective success and to each other as teammates. It’s about taking care of our company and each other.”

Simultaneously Facebook sent out a tweet explaining that its News Feed will now be known simply as ‘Feed’.

It’s hard to know whether all this linguistic fiddling about is evidence of some more meaningful reassessment behind the scenes, but after the recent 20% hit to its share price those sorts of conversations are surely happening between all the metamates and the metaboard-of-investors.

We’ll leave you with some tweets that seem to sum up the general reaction.