Lacking manpower elsewhere, Meta dissolved the department responsible for detecting “potential damage to society” generated by its products.
In any case, this is what the wall street journalstating that ” most » employees of this service have been moved to other teams, while some remain visibly on the sidelines.
The end of a service created years ago
According to a blog post written last year, the Responsible Innovation department was founded within Facebook several years ago. Its purpose was to analyze the potential damage to society generated by the products of the social network. The team included a battery of engineers and people with a background in civil rights and ethics.
Their mission was therefore to advise Mark Zuckerberg’s society in order to prevent societal problems and moral dilemmas. Earlier this year, Zvika Krieger, head of the service, had left Meta. It didn’t take long before the rest of the team was disbanded.
Most of the members of this team have thus been moved to other services on which Meta needs manpower. We can mention in particular the Reality Labs division, centered on VR headsets, such as the Quest Pro expected during the upcoming Meta Connect conference, or the metaverse Horizon Worlds.
A responsible strategy?
This is not the only team in which Meta has reshuffled the cards. During the summer, the division dedicated to artificial intelligence, also including a team in charge of responsibility, was thus reorganized within a service dealing with questions of social impact.
This societal reorganization strategy is part of a policy aimed at reducing costs, while Meta recorded for the first time in its history a significant drop in its income.
Asked by the wall street journal regarding this recent disbandment, a representative from Meta commented that the group is ” dedicated to the goals of the Responsible Innovation team “, without explaining the reasons for its premature end.
Source : wall street journal
8