A New Digital Universe: Understanding and Evaluating Facebook's Metaverse

A New Digital Universe: Understanding and Evaluating Facebook’s Metaverse

Like all great protagonists, Facebook was born from humble origins: a Harvard dorm and a young man with the intention of publicly rating his university peers based on looks. This young man with a dream, Mark Zuckerberg, risked his youth, dropped out of college and went on to build the social media giant we’ve all come to know: Facebook.

After going through the valley of darkness, years of iteration, and unlocking the secret of monetization with ads, Zuckerberg clawed his way to the top and built an empire—the Facebook Metaverse.

What Is the Facebook Metaverse?

Since its rebirth into a next-generation social media platform, Facebook has grown to unprecedented proportions. While Facebook is still synonymous with its ubiquitous social media platform, it has gone to acquire competitors, supporting services, and even hardware companies to join its ranks.

Since its first acquisition in 2005, Facebook has spent over $23 billion to get a hold of social media platforms, messaging apps, and even virtual reality hardware. Over the last fifteen years alone, Facebook has acquired over 78 companies, with some of the biggest including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.

With most acquisitions done in private, it’s likely that this number is even higher. But why would Facebook want to spend so much to acquire companies from a variety of industries? While we don’t know for sure, what we do know is that they can benefit from knowing customers, unlike other companies.

The Effects of a Granular Customer Profile

You may be wondering why it matters that a single company has so much access to your personal data. For the common person, it may even appear like these concerns are overblown. After all, who would want the data of a random guy doing ordinary things? Well, the answer is many people.

Data Brokering and Targeted Ads

When tech giants like Facebook create incredibly granular customer profiles, they don’t just have an idea of how you behave as a person. Companies can also understand, predict, and create trends for whole segments of a population.

On the positive side, an established metaverse means better products that serve your specific niche interests and more relevant ads. However, it can quickly transcend into a chaotic mess of social surveillance and ethical conundrums.

Algorithmic Biases

Many people talk about the algorithm that runs social media platforms and the ads that fund them. While algorithms are not inherently bad, they’re not entirely safe from biases, either. Similar to the people who code them, algorithms fulfill certain needs like efficiency, effectiveness, and so on. Unfortunately, these hallmarks for success often don’t necessarily include ethics.

As a social media platform, Facebook has a long history of racist, sexist, and other morally ambiguous implications of its complex algorithm. While these algorithmic biases don’t appear so critical at first, they do work to shift public perception and rhetoric that can be damaging to societies as a whole.

When it comes to social media, it’s important to remember that access to information on a curated newsfeed always comes with an agenda, even if it wasn’t the original intention.

Security Risks of Granular Data

With this in mind, it’s necessary to understand that most governments still don’t have the full grasp of the social, economic, and psychological impact the internet has on people. In many ways, this lack of tech knowledge by governing bodies puts regulation on the back seat.

In recent years, Facebook has been accused of several alarming things, from helping manipulate election results , allowing the rise of politicization on all sides, and even giving advertisers the power to know intimate details about their users without their consent.

Because the regulation often inhibits progress, many would tout the lag of regulation around technology to be a boon. However, the regulation also works to protect end-users from exploitation, especially due to ignorance. For this reason, many data brokers think more about profit than they do about protecting their consumers.

A Battle Among Giants

In 2021, Apple declared war on Facebook and other tech giants by significantly reducing their ad revenue by enabling consumers to opt out of data collection from third-party providers. While this doesn’t mean that no one has access to your data, it did significantly hamper the effectiveness of ads everywhere, especially Facebook.

For this reason, the Facebook Metaverse is stepping up and expanding to other methods of data collection. It’s no longer enough to simply rely on the various data brokers it is affiliated with. As much as possible, Facebook wants to go head-to-head with the other giants in every sense of the word, especially because the war will be won by who can collect the most data from the customers and monetize it.

What makes the Facebook Metaverse a force to be reckoned with is not just that it’s gaining unprecedented access to us online, but that it is also gaining the power to transcend into the physical world. While before, people could just decide to delete apps made by Facebook and call it a day, it’s almost no longer possible to keep your data out of its grasp. It is a curious and terrifying situation, one that, as a society, we are experiencing for the first time.

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The Perils of Being an Ordinary Person

When we think of the metaverse, it’s often within the context of heroes and villains. However, it’s important to understand that when talking about the internet, things are not so black and white. At the heart of it, most of the problems the tech giants of today are that they are not run by gods who are infallible. Despite all the talk of algorithms, these companies are very much human, which is both their greatest weakness and strength.

It is true that the world’s most remarkable people are at the helm of the top tech companies. However, even they are grasping at straws at what it truly means to have so much power over how our society rises or falls. Even the most intelligent of our kind has barely scratched the surface of what the internet can do and how it can change us in ways that we never thought were possible.

However, like all empires, it’s us ordinary people who are guinea pigs and collaterals in this fight for control over our data. In fact, it doesn’t even really matter which overlord reigns supreme. For convenience and cat videos, we are watching the end of the right to be anonymous, offline, and forgotten. The silly thing is, we are doing so with thunderous applause.