Meta wrecks its brand

Two weeks ago, I wrote a retrospective of 2024’s tech trends. In it, I gushed about Meta’s turnaround in the last four years. From controversial, social-app-first company that many blamed for fanning the fires of hate in the US and across the world to a made-up, future-facing brand that is building the next generation of consumer hardware (like the Ray Ban Meta smart glasses or Orion) and software (like Horizon).

I’d written about this back in September, too. That article, named I think Facebook’s rebrand to Meta worked argued that – purely from a brand management point of view – burying the Facebook Company and pouring millions upon millions into the new Meta brand identity had paid off. No one was talking about Meta as a social company any more. It felt, at least from where I was stood, that the brand had a friendlier exterior.

Both articles feel right for 2024, but naive in 2025.

Three years of hard graft from Meta’s marketing communications department had started, I think, to pay off. The heat was off Meta. They’d barely spent any time showing off their social platforms publicly, save for an ad campaign for their least controversial product, featuring everyone’s favourite TV family.

Meta felt like a different, future-facing company that, sure, owned some important legacy social infrastructure and a sketchy past, but no one was really talking about that anymore.

The day after, I now-embarrassingly posted that “2024 was the year I think I became a Meta fan??” on LinkedIn, and Mark Zuckerberg posts the news that he’s ending fact checking and removing “censorship” (read: moderation) from his platforms, replacing it with X-style community notes.

Now what I wrote feels naive. I thought Meta had become a company it clearly isn’t. Maybe it had, institutionally, but not in Zuckerberg's brain?

Whatever happened, Meta certainly feels like this meme in real life right about now:

So what to learn from this? Well – a few things, I think...

It takes years to (re)build a brand, and mere moments to crater it

This, to be sure, assumes that Zuckerberg’s moderation changes are negative, and that they’ll be perceived negatively. I’m sure this won’t be true in all corners of society: there are plenty of people who will have welcomed the news that hate speech is now fair game.

But this is a jarring change of direction for the brand. And this direction is not aligned to how Meta has been building itself back up over the last four years.

I suspect that Zuckerberg’s changes will deal a great amount of damage to Meta’s ability to hire great talent, to sell its (impressive) hardware products to liberally-minded customers and perhaps to attract advertisers too (although there has been zero evidence of this yet).

Founder-led companies, even huge ones, are at risk of big U-turns like this

I can’t imagine being Meta’s brand manager right now, after the last four years.

A year of memes and mocking over the name change in 2021 (and some course correction after over-emphasis on the “metaverse” being where we’ll all live in the future), through to doubling down on its moderation and fact-checking programmes in 2022-23.

Then finally, a winning way to divert the heat away from social controversies in 2024, by pushing their narrative towards novel products like Orion, Quest and Ray Ban Meta.

And then in one short Reel, the strategy is undone.

Good brand strategies take years to play out. Once they do, though, you start to realise the benefit in positive customer perception, propensity to buy and likelihood to recommend. I would never have bought a Meta product before 2024, but I did because of the reputational rehabilitation Meta’s team had performed.

It turns out 2024 was a standout year, because that is the only year I’ll ever buy a Meta product.

Overall this is a confusing, conflicting mess for consumers

Stepping away from brand strategy for a moment, the political consequences here are frankly wild. Most of modern speech and expression is now firmly under the control of billionaires. For folks like me outside of the US, this is even scarier somehow.

This, of course, has been the case for years now. Musk has owned X since 2022 and Zuckerberg has owned Meta since it was founded way back in 2004. But the implications have only grown. These are addictive products that billions of people enjoy using and rely on for the most human of impulses: communicating and collaborating with each other.

In 2025, this concentrated power in the hands of so few has turned dangerous, I think. Facebook, Instagram, Threads and X are all less safe places for vulnerable people because their owners have decided to make them less safe in a political tradeoff.

And it’s confusing. Because it doesn’t feel like an immediate threat. I open Instagram and it shows me videos of cats doing funny things.

But the algorithm is now allowed to show me worse things – lies, hoaxes, hate speech.

Here’s why it’s conflicting, though: traditionally, to change things we vote with our feet. We move to platforms or places that we prefer, that align with our values. But because for so many the changes will be subtle and unnoticed, and for others they’re just purely addicted, there will never be a critical mass of movement. So it will spiral, and become worse.

So what can brand managers learn from this?

Hey look, maybe I’m wrong. My core assumption here is that Zuckerberg’s moderation changes will be harmful. Maybe they’ll actually be better. People like Yoel Roth, longtime policy head at Twitter before Musk, don’t seem to think so. But maybe we’ll be surprised.

What I do know, though, is that the years of careful curation from the Meta brand team have gone to waste and they’ll need to pivot. How will they create a politically neutral, favoured brand in a world where their CEO is so clearly leaning one way with policy?

I have no answers, and I'm not sure they will yet either.

What can we learn, though? Well – it's the importance of keeping CEOs and company leadership onside as a brand manager. Repeatedly, tell them the impact your brand communications are having. Make sure they're across your strategy and why you've set it. Tell them about the risks of derailing the strategy. Talk about what your best customers value and where the risks are.

Meta's brand has been run well over the last four years – I'm sure the team there have been doing exactly this. So this, I think, is the other lesson.

Founder-led companies will ultimately do what the founder wants, often in the face of convincing arguments the other way. And there's little anyone can do to stop them.

So if you work for a company with power concentrated purely at the founder level – ask yourself this: what could your founder do tomorrow? And how would you prepare for it?