Internal memos suggest Meta, which owns Facebook, has plans to add virtual coins, tokens, and lending to its apps. This includes “social” or “reputation” tokens that reward substantive contributions to Facebook groups.

Why should we care?
After Meta abandoned its Diem cryptocurrency project for regulatory reasons, the company’s decision to restart virtual-currency projects may come as a surprise. But, after its $220B market valuation loss in February due to a potential nosedive in ad-based revenues, Meta’s had to shape sort of finance-forward strategy to continue growing. Two anonymous sources told the Financial Times that Meta has identified digital tokens as the least regulated way to offer a digital currency, making it the most promising way forward. If used to reward meaningful contributors to Facebook groups, Meta thinks these tokens might also help reduce costs related to content moderation. This raises major red flags. If everyday users are deputized to moderate content and are rewarded financially to do so, then this may create a highly policed—and, for some users, profitable—social media landscape without any centralized content-moderation policies guiding it. This indirectly centralized token system departs significantly from the company’s prior efforts by not being blockchain-based, but it may run into many of the same regulatory issues in the long run.