Religion and political views and “interest in” will be removed from Facebook profile information starting December 1. Until now you could make public statements there, for example whether you are interested in women or men and to which religion you belong. Media consultant Matt Navarra posted an accompanying screenshot on Twitter.
Meta announces so-called community forums for this: difficult decisions must be discussed in such forums. “Communities bring together diverse group members from around the world to discuss difficult issues while considering all concerns and sharing their perspective and recommendations.” This is also justified by Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite argument, to give more people a voice. Under this motto, he founded the social network together with his friends.
Looking for improvements to the Metaverse
Questions discussed in these communities generally include those related to Meta and Facebook itself. It’s about the experiences people have with the apps of the house. A first forum would take place in December, it’s about the Metaverse. Nearly 6,000 members from 32 countries will be represented. That means that there are also about 6000 voices that need to be heard. It will be conducted as an online event by the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) and the Deliberative Democracy Lab at the Stanford Center for Democracy. The consultation takes place in closed online spaces.
According to the blog post, this meeting will focus on the virtual experience users have in closed worlds: for example, in Horizon World, i.e. Facebook’s metaverse. Security, data protection and social media experts are available to answer questions from the advisors. At the end everything is evaluated and the results are published. A similar event has already taken place on the climate crisis.
Meanwhile, Meta has announced plans to lay off about 11,000 employees. It doesn’t exactly run smoothly at the social media giant. Mark Zuckerberg is betting almost everything on the “Metaverse” map as the next big thing. Even if that means spending way more money than you earn.
(emw)