By Tom Wheeler, Brookings, September 30, 2021
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told listeners to his July 2021 quarterly earnings call that “I expect people will transition from seeing us as a social-media company to seeing us as a metaverse company.” A few weeks later, the business plan had morphed into a political plan and the Washington Post headlined, “How Facebook’s ‘metaverse’ became a political strategy in Washington.” “[T]he metaverse is already a full-on political push,” the article explained, with the goal to position the company “far from the controversies of social media”, such as privacy, antitrust, content moderation, and political extremism.
But Zuckerberg is wrong. Far from pushing today’s online problems off the front page, the metaverse heightens our challenges. Issues such as personal privacy, marketplace competition, and misinformation only become greater challenges in the metaverse due to the interconnectedness of that phenomenon. Rather than being distracted by the shiny new bauble, policymakers need to focus on the underlying problems of the digital revolution, which won’t go away with new technological developments.
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