[Music] in october 2021 ceo mark zuckerberg announced he was changing facebook's name to meta and expanding its borders into the metaverse what is the metaverse a metaverse in the metaverse the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet the company promises a new reality full of avatars and futuristic worlds today we're going to talk about the metaverse i want to share what we imagine is possible it comes as other billionaires are venturing into new realms jeff bezos and elon musk have poured billions into space projects i want to thank every amazon employee and every
amazon customer because you guys paid for all this but as these businessmen expand their territories there are growing concerns about how their technologies are impacting the [Music] on world 6th the group of trump supporters violently stormed the u.s capitol building i was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm as i heard a chance of killing with his own gun documents leaked by whistleblower francis halgen and shone a new light on how facebook did little to stop the attack like they basically said oh good we made it through the election there
wasn't riots we can get rid of civic integrity now fast forward a couple months we got the insurrection and revealed how the company knew it was spread in hate and misinformation on a global scale from stoking ethnic violence in ethiopia to fuel in a genocide in myanmar [Music] the more we're invisible the more harm is done and we've seen this in myanmar and we've seen it in india and we're living it in ethiopia now [Music] so why does facebook now meta continue to put profit ahead of the safety of its users this research is not
a bombshell it's not causal research it's in fact just well i beg to differ with you ms davis this research is a bombshell and as the world follows mark zuckerberg into the metaverse can we trust it [Music] facebook's rebranded may be a cynical attempt to shift focus from its numerous failures it sounds like we made a mistake there i apologize for that in retrospect it was a mistake we have made a lot of mistakes in running the company it was my mistake and i'm sorry but the metaverse at least on the surface promises a new
era today we're seen as a social media company but in our dna we are a company that builds technology to connect people and the metaverse is the next frontier so this was an inevitable sort of next step in the evolution of social media allowing the virtual physical presence of the people that you're connected to from around the world to you oh hey mark hey what's going on what's up whoa we're floating in space who made this place it's awesome what mark zuckerberg is doing is he's trying to advance his pocketbook zuckerberg was the future once
now it's vr and he's trying to get into it [Music] more data makes good business sense facebook has a very clear business model that's driven by the need to gather as much data about their consumers or users as possible but they are fears that the new data we create in the metaverse could lead to a privacy nightmare facebook has made a big deal about the fact that it's not going to be doing facial recognition on photos that you upload to facebook anymore but it hasn't said it's not going to do facial recognitions in the metaverse
and so the point is they're building an ai driven engine that will be manipulating even more effectively behavior in the metaverse than it's been able to manipulate in in real space and although generating more data is not necessarily harmful it could give companies like facebook an unprecedented amount of control mark zuckerberg holds as much or more power over the connection and communications that people have than anyone ever has before so long as that business model doesn't change meta is a much more terrifying version of what facebook is in the real world right now [Music] just
weeks before facebook's rebranding former employee frances haugen released thousands of internal documents the papers show the potential harm of its products harm that could be amplified in the metaverse i believe facebook's products harm children stoke division and weaken our democracy the leak suggests facebook knew how damaging its products could be and ignored employees who had concerns it is proven that every time they denied these things before they were not just unfair in their denials and attacks on independent researchers but they knew that those people were right and that takes it from you know just being
defensive to being deceptive according to facebook's own research reported by the wall street journal their platforms make body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls none of it came as a massive surprise you know instagram harms kids i remember telling a 13 year old about it and she was like yeah everyone knows that facebook may be having its big tobacco moment in the 90s ceos of big tobacco firms stood up in congress and attempted to play down the dangers of cigarettes yes or no do you believe nicotine is not addictive i believe nicodemus
is not addictive yet imagine a world in which cigarettes gave people cancer but only the tobacco companies knew that and only the tobacco companies had any chance of finding out in that world i think it would be extremely important for someone within the companies to come forward and tell the world what they know these companies have played a very very clever game in trying to protect their reputations despite the amount of harm they produce and that's why now facebook and google spend more than philip morris and exxon on lobbying in the us [Applause] these deceptions
can have dangerous consequences [Music] in january trump supporters stormed the u.s capitol building the leak suggests facebook failed to take steps to mitigate the spread of misinformation and polarizing content on its platform extremists used many platforms but facebook is a recurring theme for years this platform was allowing itself to be used to sow distrust in elections and to build more and more anger in these communities some safeguards put in place for the 2020 election were rolled back in the lead-up to the attack they had a whole series of circuit breakers as they would call them
to kind of slow down the craziness that was obviously developing but late into the afternoon of january 6 they hadn't even pulled the trigger on more than half of them you'll never take back our country with weakness you have to show strength and you have to be strong look nobody should think that they caused january 6 but certainly if it weren't for facebook it would have been harder to develop the extraordinary organization and capacity that january 6 revealed weeks after francis halgon's revelations facebook and its other products instagram and whatsapp were hit by a major
power outage it was so bad that the only way facebook could let the world know what was going on and this is true was by posting a message on twitter [Applause] the outage showed how much the world relies on facebook for better and for worse for over a year ethiopia has been locked in a brutal civil war in august 28 bodies some with hands tied and bullet holes washed up on the shores of a river on the sudanese border witnesses believe they came from tigrai the ethiopian government called the discovery a fake propaganda campaign we
don't know how many have died because we don't have a real body count so far but it's one of the bloodiest war we've seen so far facebook knew it was being used to incite ethnic violence in the country but did little more we've seen state and state actors using the platform to spread misinformation and disinformation to an extent where you'd have content that's you know calling for ethnic extermination of certain ethnic groups we know that different militia groups were organizing using the platform to raise money for arms getting many other things that would be against
many international laws a deadly conflict fueled by facebook and not for the first time the company is also accused of playing a role in the brutal crackdown of rohingya muslims in myanmar in 2017 what the papers demonstrate is that the government in myanmar used the facebook platform to exacerbate ethnic division which led to genocide in myanmar they're not to blame for the existence of folks you know who are pursuing a genocidal campaign but they did deliberately become the engine this is a global problem in vietnam facebook bowed to pressure from the government to censor content
[Music] and in india facebook's platforms have been inundated with a torrent of anti-muslim hate speech part of the problem is the lack of investment facebook places outside the us ninety percent of facebook's audience is outside the united states but ninety percent of facebook's safety budget is inside the united states so they are literally incapable of any moderation at all in many many countries around the world and what that means is that hate and misinformation are flowing even more rapidly in other countries for activists the reported lack of consideration given to other countries came as little
surprise and we all have to sort of live with the consequences of a system that makes us completely invisible and the more we're invisible you know the more harm is done and we've seen this in myanmar and we're living it in ethiopia now the cost of them fixing their platforms is actually they have to hire people the cost of them doing nothing is zero and so they've calculated of course it's so much cheaper to let the world burn [Music] in the u.s politicians are growing angry mark zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the
mirror today and yet rather than taking responsibility and showing leadership mr zuckerberg is going sailing but have so far been unable to reign in the once untouchable company mark zuckerberg has proven that he is not the one to be trusted with dominating the next level which will now be the metaverse when he hasn't even addressed any of these issues facebook might be the winner of the next generation too and that would be a disaster because the truth is they've administered this generation appallingly badly for many it begs broader questions our current debates about tech platforms
like meta like facebook are debates about what kind of culture what kind of society we want to live in in an increasingly globalized world that's a more and more challenging question to answer [Music] you
