Authors:

  • Thomas Wheeler

Excerpt

September 30, 2021, Opinion: "Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told listeners to his July 2021 quarterly earnings call that “I expect people will transition from seeing us as a social-media company to seeing us as a metaverse company.” A few weeks later, the business plan had morphed into a political plan and the Washington Post headlined, “How Facebook’s ‘metaverse’ became a political strategy in Washington.” “[T]he metaverse is already a full-on political push,” the article explained, with the goal to position the company “far from the controversies of social media”, such as privacy, antitrust, content moderation, and political extremism."

HKS M-RCBG Research Fellow - Tom Wheeler