There are many things that Facebook could tackle: disinformation, violence and hatred on its own platform, radicalization, opaque algorithms. And Mark Zuckerberg? Better talk about the Metaverse.
At the South by Southwest (SXSW) tech conference, the Facebook founder spent 50 minutes raving about this idea of Internet+, which is intended to merge the digital and analogue worlds. And in doing so, promoting the new vision of his company Meta, formerly known as Facebook, almost in passing.
"I think before we launched the new brand, people saw that as a very secondary part of what we were doing compared to all the social media stuff," Zuckerberg said during his SXSW appearance. "But the meta-vision is about putting a flag in the ground and pushing what we're doing even further into the future and saying, ok, we're not going to trip-step towards the metaverse." The Metaverse is what's bringing new hope to Silicon Valley companies right now. At SXSW, one of the most important industry meetings of all, there are dozens of lectures that deal with the fact that the future of fashion, work, art, gaming, even society, lies in the Metaverse.
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Mark Zuckerberg apparently wants to go down in history as one of the founding fathers of this new virtual world - or worlds. He didn't invent the concept of the metaverse, but by renaming his company he did a great deal to make it better known. Much of the Metaversum idea remains vague. It's about "feeling really present" in digital environments, Zuckerberg said. Today you look at the Internet, "in the future you will be there". Holograms, virtual meeting rooms, augmented reality glasses that put a digital layer of information on top of the analogue world. It's kind of all part of the Metaverse. Or to the metaverses. There is no agreement as to whether they should actually all create a metaverse together or whether there should be different metaverses.
New worlds, new markets
So far, Zuckerberg's Metaverse looks like The Sims in VR. The product for entering Meta's own Metaverse is called Horizon Worlds, and it's a colorful, comic-like virtual reality that you can maneuver through on the company's Oculus VR headset. Going forward, Zuckerberg says he sees the Metaverse as a new version of the internet: an infrastructure on which anyone can build anything. He and his company Meta want to provide the basic technologies. This is also how tech thought leaders like to explain why it's a bit difficult to paint a clear picture of the Metaverse of the future. In the 1990s, many people asked themselves what to do with this global network.
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New worlds are also and above all, Zuckerberg makes no secret of this, new markets. "This will create a new economy that will hopefully create many millions of jobs," he said. One can certainly assume that Meta will find a way to earn money from it. The individual applications, games, entertainment or productivity tools should also be produced by others, the creators . This also includes fashion, after all it is important for people to express themselves personally. In the future, fashion brands could design digital clothing or accessories and sell them for money. Some companies like Hugo Boss or Balenciaga are already experimenting with such applications. This is also the point where the Metaverse is linked to the Web3. Blockchain technology can be used to establish that a digital asset belongs to a specific person. Thus, users should not only own their virtual clothes or other goods within an application, as is already possible today, for example in games in which you can buy so-called skins for real money, with which the character changes their appearance. Instead, the Metaverse panels should be able to be taken from one application to the next. Interoperability is very important, says Zuckerberg.
It is unclear whether this only applies to different applications within the meta-metaverse or whether you can wear your digital clothes in the metaverse of another company, for example. Zuckerberg isn't the only one using the Metaverse. Microsoft is also fully committed to this new vision. By renaming his company, however, Zuckerberg has managed to ensure that his name comes up almost every time the Metaverse is discussed. Not infrequently, however, with a mocking undertone. This is also the case at SXSW. "The sugar verse will fail," said Scott Galloway during his presentation in Austin, Texas. The economics professor at New York University (NYU) has been presenting his "provocative predictions" there for years. One of them is that Mark Zuckerberg's company isn't well positioned for what it's recently been naming it to be.
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One of the reasons for this is that Galloway does not believe that VR glasses have a great future. "In my wildest dreams, I couldn't have imagined that Mark Zuckerberg would decide that the future of Facebook lies in this product that 40 to 70 percent of people say makes them sick," he says. The Oculus, Meta's VR headset, will be the "hardware failure of the decade". In fact, while more VR glasses are sold every year, the numbers are almost negligible compared to other devices such as game consoles. Or headphones. Almost everyone has them and it is not uncommon for them to come from a specific company: Apple. The AirPods, wireless headphones for in or over the ear, are selling so well that Apple's headphone division alone would be one of the 200 largest companies in the United States, calculates Galloway. Airpods are the "ultimate portal" into the Metaverse, he says. Therefore, Meta will not win the race for the Metaverse, but Apple. Lies laced with anger and hatred spread faster and further than facts on social media.
In any case, one thing Zuckerberg has achieved with his Metaverse efforts: There is another reason to talk to him and about him that is not Facebook. It was suspected from the start that one of the motivations for the name change was to get rid of Facebook's increasingly bad image. At least that's so far that Zuckerberg can give a lecture at SXSW, which is mainly about the golden future of Meta. The uncomfortable topics are discussed without him. "Lies spiked with anger and hatred spread faster and further than facts on social media," said Nobel Peace Prize winner and journalist Maria Ressa just a few hours earlier on the same stage where Zuckerberg would later be connected digitally. "By design they are destroying our democracies and radicalizing us." Ressa therefore calls social networks like Facebook "behaviour modification systems". There she discussed with disinformation researcher Peter Pomerantsev about disinformation and oppression, particularly, but not only, in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The product has to change
That Mark Zuckerberg and his company know this and could do something about it is the message that former Facebook employee Frances Haugen shared with Zuckerberg on the SXSW stage the day before. Haugen began publishing internal documents from the Facebook group in October last year, further fueling the ongoing debate about the social network. Before the US Congress and the EU Parliament, she called for Big Tech companies to be more heavily regulated. Their message: Facebook's leaders are more concerned about growth and profit than the harmful consequences of their own products, such as the spread of disinformation and hate messages.
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At SXSW, she explains what would help – and what wouldn't. It is wrong to only focus on erasing hate and hate speech or combating disinformation with fact checks. "Censorship", as she calls it, i.e. the deletion of posts by machine or human moderators, is a difficult topic in the US discourse anyway, because the freedom of speech, which is enshrined in the first amendment to the constitution, is interpreted very fundamentally by many: Anyone can say everything
But there are much better ways to combat problems like disinformation on Facebook anyway. Instead of starting at the level of the individual content, you have to change the product, says Haugen. For example, it would make sense to make it a little less easy to redistribute content, she says. One option would be to limit who can share posts. Friends and friends of friends could then simply click on the posts as before. Anyone further away would have to copy and paste the post first. Or you could add a short wait time to get people to read the article before sharing it.
Up to 35 percent of the content people see on Facebook is re-shares. The effect of such measures could be correspondingly large. The fact that Twitter, for example, is experimenting with users having to click on a link before they can share it is a step in the right direction. "It's crazy: That little bit of friction reduces disinformation by 10 to 15 percent," she says.
Mark Zuckerberg knows that too. "He could protect us without censoring us, but he chooses not to because the current system is more profitable," says Haugen. It's only a very small part of the profit. And yet: "He doesn't want to make you wait 30 seconds," says Haugen.
In fact, product decisions on Facebook have so far tended to go in the opposite direction. Features that allow posting to multiple groups at once, or adding thousands of people to groups at once, can encourage users to engage more with the platform — but they can also allow disinformation to spread at lightning speed.
New world with old problems
Laws are needed that oblige companies like Facebook to disclose their algorithms, said Haugen. Then external observers could also see how the recommendation systems work and which changes could have which effect. The disinformation researcher Pomerantsev also demanded this: "Disclose the algorithm," he said, referring to Zuckerberg. "Make sure we can ensure this incredibly powerful technology is good for democracy."
It seems Zuckerberg would rather chat about the Metaverse than his platform's fundamental issues. It's also remarkable because it completely ignores one thing: that Facebook's problems in the Metaverse today aren't going to go away. On the contrary: a new platform, especially one that is even more immersive, could actually exacerbate some problems.
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