NFT Artists and Meta – Will the Problems of Trust Be Solved?

Recently it became known that Meta hopes to explore NFTs in the nearest future – Instagram confirms to add new features as soon as possible. However, Attafuah, the Australian artist, says she's not swayed by its potential for commerce. "I don't really trust any of these sites," she admits. Instagram has 20,000 followers for the Australian artist's Afro-futuristic abstract NFTs. She claims that the platform that helped her build a network, sell her work, and expand her audience in the beginning no longer exists. On Instagram, she's been less active recently due to scams, data privacy, and copyright infringements of her paintings.

Attafuah's worries were mirrored by NFT artists throughout the globe who were contacted by Forbes. Many people have started to abandon Instagram in favor of other social media sites like Twitter, or at least to use it less often. They doubted Meta's ability to create a marketplace where they weren't always on the lookout for scams and frauds.

As the best-selling female NFT artist in the world, Itzel Yard has said, Instagram is awash with impersonators. It seems that Yard's Instagram was hacked.

"Someone scraped my Instagram like they just copied everything from it, and they placed it on OpenSea and began attempting to sell it," Yard said.

For a variety of reasons, NFT specialists and artists are dubious about Meta's approach. While the NFT community values decentralization and autonomy, it is a centralized company. Because NFT artists believe in freedom of speech, Meta has attempted to regulate information on its site. In addition, there's the worry that Meta is just jumping on the bandwagon to earn money off of Web3's potential. With the help of high-profile celebrities and fashion companies, NFT trading on OpenSea hit a record $4 billion in January.

Merav Ozair, a blockchain specialist and a fintech professor at Rutgers Business School, says decentralized art sales don't "resonate well" with a firm like Facebook. When it comes to manipulating the price of art, Ozair is skeptical about Meta's ability to follow people's movements in the Metaverse. NFT transaction tracker Nonfungible.com co-founder and president Dan Kelly called Meta's debut into the market "cautiously dubious." Additionally, he is aware that Meta's decision might further legitimize the Web3 community, which could lead to a broader acceptance and a more profitable marketplace.

Privacy issues, on the other hand, are a constant source of frustration for content providers. According to NFT specialists, Facebook reportedly enabled Cambridge Analytica to harvest personal information from users without their permission. Hackatao, an unknown entity of two crypto artists who have never disclosed their identity and operate in the mountains of Italy, thinks that privacy and anonymity are essential for crypto artists and the community at large. Hackatao is concerned that its provocative art, which often includes bare bodies, would be taken down by social media giants like Facebook and Instagram.

The corporation previously known as Facebook has been the subject of much investigation in recent months. Sadly for Zuckerberg and Co., their idea for virtual art is facing the same fate. Skeptics say the company's concept of the future of digital art is too narrow and basic, despite the company's release of a film encouraging viewers to "enter an imaginative world with Meta and explore unlimited possibilities in 3D."