Facebook has become a mini-enforcement arm of the state.
The company has been caught censoring material in support of the establishment.
And one dangerous new Facebook product is raising major red flags.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is under fire from all sides.
Conservatives are furious at the company for banning and de-boosting their content, and the Left is irate that Facebook won’t censor even more conservative content.
Facebook’s response to the flak is to make the company all the more problematic.
Zuckerberg renamed the company Meta, and introduced a new product called the Metaverse that includes virtual and augmented reality.
But as was the case with Facebook, Meta is going to present serious privacy concerns.
From Slate:
The metaverse, it turns out, is less cryptographic origami and more high-tech medical exam. The metaverse inextricably links the user’s individual, corporeal body and the ideas and actions that person takes…The more deeply these devices are connected to Facebook’s ecosystem of apps and identity, the more the same old Facebook problems will come straight back to the fore: systematic mass surveillance, development of biased and opaque algorithms, and a general disdain for transparency or accountability.
Facebook already creates shadow accounts for people who never signed up for the platform; even if a person doesn’t use the internet, he or she could have siblings who list them on the site, which creates the basis for a shadow account.
The Metaverse could create a surveillance state on steroids.
And Zuckerberg has shown a willingness to do the bidding of the establishment.
Slate continued:
It means a deepening of the surveillance/advertising feedback loop that is core to Facebook’s business model. When Zuckerberg says the metaverse will be “persistent, synchronous,” hear “all-remembering, always on.” When he says “open,” hear “linked to every one of your accounts and devices”…Facebook’s “embodied internet” is not only a gross expansion of its ambition to total surveillance, it is an attempt to outpace the regulatory debate.
The past five years have shown people that Facebook cannot and should not be trusted to behave responsibly.
Facebook—along with other social media giants—summarily banned the sitting president of the United States, a move so shocking that even critics of Donald Trump blanched at.
Americans should be very leery of Zuckerberg’s so-called Metaverse.
Virtual reality is a new frontier, so there’s no telling how it could be exploited.
Stay tuned to Unmuzzled News for any updates to this ongoing story.
