When Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted the company’s plans last month to build a virtual reality "metaverse" to supplant the internet, he proclaimed that users of this platform will be able to do "almost anything" they could imagine.
Users, for instance, will be able to see concerts with their friends, buy goods and services, or attend business meetings. But many questions still linger about how the company will protect free speech and privacy rights on the platform.Facebook has been accused of unfairly suppressing one political opinion in favor of another. Mark Grady, a professor of law and economics at UCLA, worries that those problems might become more complicated in the metaverse.
"This seems to be a more ambitious undertaking than what they're doing now," Grady told FOX Business. "It seems like this idea of the multiverse just enlarges that problem."
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Amie Stephanovich, executive director of Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado, suggested a possible scenario where a user is the victim of an online troll campaign – but instead of nasty words normally seen on social media, the user is targeted by angry avatars yelling at them and the only escape is to switch off the machine.
"We approach that differently – having somebody scream at us than having somebody type at us," she said. "There is a potential for that harm to be really ramped up."
A man stands in front of a sign for Meta, the new name for the company formerly known as Facebook, at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Oct. 28, 2021. (Reuters)
Kris Kolo, executive director of the VR/AR association, pointed to current metaverses, like Microsoft’s AltspaceVR and Sensorium, where bullying and hate speech are major concerns.
"Who will control them? Do we need rules? Are they going to be kicked out of the metaverse? You know, rules like that can exist in the metaverse to prevent hate speech or bullying," he said. "Just like with any technology, I think it’s a balance. Technology is here to bring us together, to connect us in different ways and the metaverse is just a new way of immersive online experience."
When it comes to enforcing the company's policies on free speech and privacy, someone will inevitably have to moderate conversations, Kurt Opsahl, deputy executive director and general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told FOX Business.
"There are tremendous privacy issues. If you're in a metaverse and interacting with other people, everything you say and do is being captured by a device, transmitted so it reaches the other person. In the middle there is Facebook and a lot of people," Opsahl told FOX Business. "I have suspicions, founded by lots of privacy scandals in the past over whether Facebook will be a good steward of that."
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The challenge, Opsahl said, will not be so much having the right policies to moderate content but in the implementation of those policies.
Opsahl said it is imperative that Meta is open and transparent about how it enforces its policies and must give people notice or allow an appeals process if their content is taken down.
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