Facebook has launched yet another new feature. The company has added over 200 national flags to its profile frames feature, meaning that you will now be able to overlay the flag of your country right above your profile picture. While the feature is interesting enough, it kind of also goes against the grain of what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been stressing — the need for a global community.
Facebook launched profile frames back in 2015. The feature allowed people to overlay their profile pictures with all sorts of images. Many of these images also showed their affiliation to particular football teams, to different causes and so on and so forth. The company later opened this feature to everyone in 2016, allowing people to submit their own frames.
Meanwhile, the feature does lead to several questions. In his recent 5,000 word manifesto, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about the urgent need to create a global community and create a social infrastructure for its users. Launching national flags, while harmless, doesn’t seem to be the best way to promote inclusiveness and the idea of global community as it will give people just another way to differentiate themselves from people sporting different flags on their profile pictures.
With that said, Facebook has still played a massive role in bringing inclusiveness to the world. We see Indians interacting with Americans, Japanese interacting with Canadians and so on and so forth. That is an incredible achievement on the social media platform’s part. And it is still a business, so we can not expect all of its moves to be directed by its founder’s personal philosophy, no matter how noble and good they may be. That is something that needs to be borne in mind before judging Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, is situations where the two appear to be at variance.
Meanwhile, you can check the new feature out by visiting the profile frames option for your profile pictures.
