Opinion | Is Meta’s Facial Recognition Retreat Another Head Fake?

Why do you think Meta is making so much noise about this tech now? Is it because Facebook itself is dying a slow death?

I don’t fully buy Kevin Roose’s argument that Facebook is dying. Perhaps in the U.S., where the cool kids have moved onto TikTok, but in much of the world, Facebook’s products — particularly WhatsApp — are the internet. I do, however, think Zuckerberg may think that Facebook is dying because he defines his success as being on the cutting edge of tech development and interesting new engineering problems. Focusing on the metaverse allows Facebook to ignore pesky, hard-to-solve problems like limiting disinformation and online harassment and move onto something more exciting for the engineers. It’s up to the rest of us to make sure that Facebook doesn’t get to ignore the problems it has created just because it wants to cook up a new batch of problems.

What happened in Virginia?

Glenn Youngkin, the first Republican elected governor in Virginia in a dozen years, did a masterful job at being Donald Trump-lite (certainly not my cup of tea). And he was aided, unexpectedly, by the former president’s continued absence from social media, particularly Twitter, where Trump would otherwise be a daily reminder for Virginia voters of whom they shunned in 2020.

It’ll be interesting to see if Youngkin — who rode to victory by prodding at parental worries about teaching critical race theory in schools — will follow through on his anti-tech rhetoric once in office. In May, the former co-chief executive of the private-equity powerhouse Carlyle Group took to Facebook, without a whiff of irony, to whine in a video about tech companies’ censorship of conservatives.

“Our right to free speech and religion is the bedrock of this country, and it’s threatened like never before,” Youngkin said in the video. “A handful of California mega-corporations are deciding who can say what.”

He pledged, “As governor, I will stop big tech from canceling your First Amendment rights.” Never mind that Carlyle has a pile of tech investments that it brags about on its website.

Do not miss …

This perfect impression of Sheryl Sandberg by the “Late Night With Seth Meyers” writer Dina Gusovsky. You will not get this until you watch, but as a mother of a daughter, who is a sister of brothers who have a mother, who is me, a woman, I found it priceless.

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