NFT Artists To Meta: We Don’t Trust You

Serwah Attafuah has no use for Meta anymore. 

The Australian artist, who creates Afro-futuristic abstract NFTs, has 20,000 followers on Instagram, the Meta subsidiary. The platform, which she says originally helped her create a community, sell her work and grow her audience, has changed. Scams, data-privacy concerns and copyright infringements of her art are now an everyday part of life and she’s interacting on Instagram a lot less lately. 

Meta plans to dive into the world of internet art known as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, according to Financial Times. But Attafuah says she’s not seduced by the possibilities of commerce on Facebook, another Meta subsidiary, which boasts nearly 3 billion global followers.

“To be honest,” she says, “I don’t really trust any of these platforms.”

NFT artists around the world contacted by Forbes echoed Attafuah’s concerns. Many have begun fleeing Instagram, migrating to other platforms like Twitter or gradually reducing their use of it. They expressed skepticism that Meta, a social-media behemoth, could develop, launch and manage a marketplace where they weren’t looking over their shoulders, alert to the next swindle. 

Itzel Yard, the best-selling female NFT artist in the world, said Instagram is sprawling with impersonators. “In my case, someone scraped my Instagram, like they just took everything from it and they posted it on OpenSea” – another online marketplace – “and they started trying to sell it,” Yard told Forbes.   

NFT experts and artists say they’re wary of Meta’s gambit for a number of reasons. It’s a centralized business, while the NFT community prizes decentralization and autonomy. Meta has tried to censor content on its platform, while NFT artists value free expression. There’s also the suspicion that Meta is only jumping on the bandwagon to capitalize on a Web3 innovation that can make a lot of money. In January, NFT trading broke records, topping $4 billion in sales on OpenSea as celebrities and fashion brands got involved.  

Decentralized art sales don’t “resonate well with a company like Facebook,” said Merav Ozair, a blockchain expert and a fintech professor at Rutgers Business School. Ozair says she is dubious of the degree of control Meta will have on price manipulation of the art, highlighting an example of how Meta plans to track people’s movement in the metaverse.

Dan Kelly, co-founder and president of nonfungible.com, a platform that tracks NFT transactions, said he’s “cautiously skeptical” of Meta’s entry into the marketplace. He’s also aware that Meta’s decision could further legitimize the Web3 community, lead to a wider acceptance and a more lucrative marketplace. 

Privacy concerns nag at creators, though. NFT experts mentioned the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, where Facebook allegedly allowed the firm to scrape it, without user consent, for personal information it then used to help elect former President Donald Trump in 2016. “It’s really important for crypto artists and the community in general to keep their privacy and anonymity,” says Hackatao, an anonymous entity of two crypto artists who have never revealed their identity and work in the mountains of Italy. Hackatao, whose art expresses bold messages and features naked bodies, is also apprehensive of their work being banned by Facebook and Instagram.