Mark Zuckerberg's new values for Meta show he still hasn't truly let go of 'move fast and break things'

• Meta has desperately tried to distance itself from its old motto "move fast and break things."
• CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new company values on Tuesday which included "move fast."

Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced a new set of corporate values for Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook.

First amongst the six new corporate values outlined by Zuckerberg, which included calling employees "metamates," was "move fast" — a shortened echo of the company's first motto, "move fast and break things."

Zuckerberg announced in 2014 that the company had changed this to the less catchy: "Move fast with stable infrastructure."

Zuckerberg said in his Tuesday post that "move fast" means: "acting with urgency and not waiting until next week to do something you could do today."

"At our scale, this also means continuously working to increase the velocity of our highest priority initiatives by methodically removing barriers that get in the way."

The language is less destructive, but "removing barriers" sounds an awful lot like breaking them.

"Move fast and break things" has come back to haunt Facebook/Meta over the years. As the company has faced wave after wave of scandals over privacy, misinformation, and harmful content, critics have held its original motto up as evidence of a tendency towards collateral damage.

The company has desperately tried to distance itself from the slogan in an attempt to convince the public and lawmakers that it's a responsible company. VP of public policy Nick Clegg told Axios in September last year that the company's development of so-called metaverse technology will run counter to its old mantra.

"It's almost the opposite of that now long-abandoned slogan of 'move fast and break things,'" said Clegg.

Jim Prior, CEO at brand agency Superunion, told Insider that Meta was unwise to keep "move fast" in its corporate DNA if it wants to convince people it's a socially conscious company.

"It may be hard to tell a team member they should have considered something more thoroughly, or not rushed a decision, when 'move fast' is a core value of the company," Prior said.

"With a value like this one cannot help but suppose that Meta values speed over accuracy, or even responsibility," he added.

Prior told Insider that Zuckerberg's post won't do much to convince the outside world the company is changing.

"Values are only valuable when they are adopted and actioned by the internal team. Hanging them out to dry in the public domain is just an attempt at advertising, really, and not one that is likely to make any real difference to how anybody outside the company perceives it," he said.

"What matters is what is going to happen internally as a result of these and how they are made manifest in the actions of the company," Prior added.