Facebook's Metaverse will add "new risks for minors," warns a digital reputation expert who deals with cases of cyberbullying and cyberbullying in networks

Facebook has announced its Metaverse and its parent company is now known as Meta. It is not a metaphor: the main product of Mark Zuckerberg's company will from now on be a metaverse, a new digital and social dimension in which users, through avatars, will be able to interact with each other.

The possible motivations behind this business decision have been written about. The revelations of the leaked Facebook Papers have aggravated the company's reputational crisis, to the point that the European Competition Commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, ended up exploding a few days ago in an interview with the German station DW. "We must act now," he settled.

Maximum data control, affronts to the privacy of its users, scandals like Cambridge Analytica. There are many factors that have deteriorated the public image of Facebook and its creator, Mark Zuckerberg. But ending up as a giant metaverse may not be the answer to everything. Not at least for the safety of its users.

The official presentation of the company's new brand took place last Thursday, at the annual developer conference known as Facebook Connect. In his intervention, Zuckerberg himself promised that the construction of Meta would have privacy and parental control measures to safeguard the security and integrity of its users.

The real reason Facebook changes its name to Meta and pursues its metaverse

But those same commitments already exist on their current social platforms, Facebook or Instagram, recalls the digital reputation specialist Selva Orejón. Orejón is CEO of onBRANDING, a firm that is dedicated to online reputation and that has dealt with very conflictive cases in social networks: from cyberbullying, bullying, more or less common scams...

Some of these cases have led to deaths by suicide.

"Beyond what they are promising, they have realized the reputational costs they have had due to cybersecurity incidents," the specialist told Business Insider Spain. Orejón aggravates her tone and considers that if she had remained undaunted, Facebook would become an accomplice in many of the cybercrimes that occur in its services.

Large tech companies like Facebook are required to collaborate with law enforcement. Often, and in response to court orders, these companies share the data and information they extract from certain users when they are involved in cases of harassment or other crimes.

Private companies that also deal with these cases have an internal system with Facebook where they can submit their claims so that the company meets the request, for example, to recover an account that has been stolen on their social network. However, Selva Orejón explains to this medium that this system is getting slower every day.

"It's not that they work anymore, the reality is that they don't have enough human resources dedicated to responding to these requests. If the value proposition of this metaverse goes in that direction, it's because Facebook has done a demoscopy and has given account of the concerns of its users and the main obstacles to its growth", he considers.

Like 'The Truman Show' or 'The Circle'

Selva Orejón and her team are used to looking at the most perverse side of the net. In any type of social network, illegal content and crimes of harassment or hate emerge. From minors to company managers who have to deal with orchestrated mockery or smear campaigns on a daily basis.

For this reason, the idea that users now interact on a platform that will guarantee "a sensation of presence", in the words of the CEO of Meta, can even be a chilling insinuation.

"For minors, all of this can be a much higher risk. Especially if at home, for example, the devices we use to connect to the Metaverse start throwing comments from third-party users." If it was not enough to read a painful comment on a social network, in a metaverse without much control now it could even be aggravated by the tone of voice.

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Orejón believes that Facebook's Metaverse initiative seeks to digitize some of the loopholes of physical life that had not yet made the leap to the network: the real spaces that we visit or in which we live. "Now that the networks are so exploited, augmented reality viewers could be useful for big technology companies to know what our houses are like."

"For example, if a multinational knows how and how much we walk a day, it knows what the space in our houses will be like. That could be useful for firms to offer us tools, furniture or motifs and decorations." It is a new layer of data that firms will be able to exploit.

"We continue to fight with domestic cases, which on Instagram are usually fatal. From cases in which it has ended up costing him his life to public figures who suffer repeated harassment. If to all this we add that layer of simulation of face-to-face...". Jungle is quick to refer to movies like James Ponsoldt's The Circle.

Profits are growing, efficiency in moderation is not

A few days ago, Facebook presented its results for the third quarter of its fiscal year. In the fourth, the multinational achieved a profit of 9,100 million dollars (8,000 million euros), 17% more than in the same period of the previous year. However, its advertising revenue has stagnated.

Despite this improved profit, Facebook is facing several fronts with regulators launching inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic. The revelations of the Facebook Papers have shown how the technology was aware that its algorithms to stop hate speech, anti-vaccine campaigns and misinformation have turned out to be ineffective.

In fact, some workers emphasized in conversations through the internal platform of the social network that these tools were ineffective in English and practically "non-existent" when it came to other languages.

The European Union is already working on a legislative package known as the DSA, the Digital Services Act. This package includes the Digital Services bill itself, as well as another one on Digital Markets. Both drafts were presented by the competent European commissioners exactly one year ago.

Drafts that have their own challenge: if the same mistakes are made that were made with the Data Protection Regulation, the regulation would become obsolete.

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These two new proposals seek to respond to a need: to update an electronic commerce directive from the year 2000. Some of the regulations that the Union intends to address in this way is the need to provide digital platforms with more guarantees and the moderation of their contents. This is a delicate political debate, since it involves the right to freedom of expression.

In an appearance in the Spanish Senate, the Public Policy manager of Facebook Iberia considered that more effective alternatives had to be found rather than forcing the big technology companies to show part of their algorithms so that they could be properly audited. The consideration came shortly after precisely that initiative started from Europe.

Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, insisted a few days ago on regulating Facebook. And if it does, it should be now, since the technological giant "could keep us in court for years." "If we come together, we can make real change." "For Facebook to take the risks it puts young people and their mental health at would be an important step forward."

"We also need to regulate very finely if we are faced with someone who can have an immense influence on our mental health and how our democracies function."