Back in the day, Facebook was on top. We Poked and Farmville’d our way through life without a care in the world. But now, as Mark Zuckerberg pointed out in an earnings call, Facebook is out of fashion. As reported by The Information, Zuckerberg expressed a desire to return to “OG Facebook,” back when it was in its cultural heyday.
“I think that there are a lot of opportunities to make it way more culturally influential than it is today,” he said.
To achieve this lofty goal, Zuckerberg is reportedly consulting some of the biggest creators in the biz: MrBeast and Mark Rober. Rober, a former NASA engineer and current science creator, has 64 million YouTube subscribers and 5.3 million Facebook followers.
The Information claims that his team has been spending six months talking to Meta about Facebook, and in a short interview with the outlet, he made his feelings clear. He said that Facebook has “a big hill to climb” in order to meet Zuckerberg’s ambitions, adding: “Instagram is culturally relevant. Facebook is not.”
MrBeast’s reps didn’t respond to The Information’s request for comment.
Although Facebook has more monthly active users than Instagram, it’s a cultural wasteland. Apart from the occasional crucified Minion meme or AI slop, the platform doesn’t offer much to creators or the next generation of netizens.
Meta has tried in the past to incentivize creators to use Facebook with a TikTok-like video feed and a Creator Bonus Program, but so far, it looks like this hasn’t been enough for creators to jump ship.
Still, above all, Zuckerberg’s decision to consult creators shows just how vital they are to the internet ecosystem. They don’t just reflect the current zeitgeist: they are the zeitgeist.
