Mark Zuckerberg is so engrossed in building a ‘super reverse empire’, that Facebook is so ‘deformed’ that it is difficult to recognize

The opposition of technology billionaires and public opinion is not as great as Zuckerberg’s ambition and seriousness for the virtual universe.

Despite all the criticism surrounding Meta, Mark Zuckerberg still stubbornly turned this into a “super reverse company”. The opposition of other tech billionaires is not as great as Zuckerberg’s ambition and seriousness for the virtual universe.

According to Mr. Zhao, a professor from the University of Chicago, the metaverse doesn’t have much potential for growth. “The real question is are users ready for the metaverse? Is the underlying technology ready and mature enough to make that transition seamless?

However, even if he ignores the majority of public opinion, CEO Meta should still reevaluate his priorities ahead of the upcoming 2022 US midterm elections. What needs to be done now is to return to Facebook, tighten the content posted and more closely monitor the process of spreading news, how to make the election “clean” as possible.

According to Bloomberg, the metaverse project is currently in its infancy. While Facebook has about 3 billion active users, Horizon Worlds, the VR platform that experiences the metaverse, has only 200,000, according to internal documents revealed by the Wall Street Journal.

Before that, Zuckerberg frankly admitted that the process of building Meta’s metaverse will take a long time, at least 5 years. This means that Mark Zuckerberg will not be able to put all his attention on the social network Facebook, at the most sensitive time in American politics.

Oddly enough, so far, Zuckerberg has shown no signs of shifting focus. According to the New York Times, Facebook’s core election tracking team is no longer as productive as it was in 2020, when CEO Meta made the US election a priority. Controls over key executives tasked with handling misinformation are also now being relaxed.

Before that, in 2020, Facebook even had emergency plans in place to block content if there was a case of social unrest after the election. Former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in charge of global affairs at the time said that the platform would take special measures to limit the spread of content in the worst-case scenario. The specific plan was not disclosed, but according to Mr. Clegg, during previous unrest in Myanmar or Sri Lanka, Facebook implemented many measures, including reducing the accessibility of content that was targeted. object that violates the sharing rule more than once.

“As the counting of votes took place, we received many inaccurate statements regarding the election. Facebook will take temporary measures to prevent this problem,” a Facebook representative at the time said.

According to social media experts, there is little evidence that Facebook can prevent disinformation better than it did in 2020. Melanie Smith, head of misinformation research at The Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, said Meta has failed to improve data access for researchers who are trying to estimate the spread of misleading posts. Even the social network Facebook has appeared a group of people who follow the election day with a hostile attitude. Such posts tend to go viral very quickly, Smith said.

According to the researchers, politicians are sometimes the ones who spread a lot of misinformation, especially in Asian countries. Therefore, Mark Zuckerberg needs to consider changing the policy, and more carefully censor content posted by politicians and voters, similar to how Meta applies to ordinary users. Many people believe that Meta’s current policy is allowing false content to be distributed.

Previously, Meta said it would handle posted content by assigning warning labels. However, this method is not really efficient. For more than 70% of posts, these stickers can only be applied 2 days after the post is published. This loophole is an opportunity for misinformation to spread before they are labeled with warnings, according to the Integrity Institute, a nonprofit research organization. The Integrity Institute also found that misinformation accounts for 90% of all social media interactions in less than a day.

Also, Facebook’s growing emphasis on video could make matters worse. In September 2022, misinformation shared via video appeared much more often than regular posts, according to a recent study cited by Bloomberg. Such false content also attracts more engagement and tends to be shown priority.

“On social media today, users tend to be ignored when safety protocols go bad. We need real transparency to build a more accountable and sustainable system,” said Sahar Massachi, co-founder of the nonprofit Integrity Institute.

In April, The Verge reported that posts containing misinformation, violence and offensive content were on the rise on the Facebook platform due to a bug in the news ranking algorithm. This makes many people question that because this social network cannot control the power created by itself.

Reportedly, the above error existed for 6 months before Facebook employees fixed the problem. A lot of offensive posts have entered users’ message boards. Worth mentioning, such content appears more and more and increases up to 30% globally.

By: Bloomberg, The Verge