The Wall Street Journal's coverage of whistleblower Francis Haughen's leaked documents from inside Facebook make for fascinating and at times very disturbing reading. Among the core findings are the way the Facebook algorithm promotes division, how Facebook has a 'white list' of elite users who can do and say what they like, and how Instagram exacerbates body image issues among teenage girls. But most damning is that Facebook knows all of this and has done little to nothing to address it.
At a time when not only users but governments want answers, the timing of Facebook's big corporate rebrand to Meta is tone deaf. And the whole concept of a Facebook-run 'metaverse' is disturbing. For a start, do people actually want this?
In this episode of the Digital Download podcast, I explore what the metaverse is and how a virtual reality world might impact us, and I look at the Wall Street Journal findings in a little more detail and try to ascertain what the implications of those are.
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