You talk a lot about how your games encourage people to get out in the world and walk around.
Over the past few years of working on AR at Niantic, I’ve gotten pretty deep into the science around walking and the brain. [Walking] is so wired into our neural pathways from evolution. Our brain comes alive in a number of ways when we’re out moving through the world in a three-dimensional environment. That’s real, and it’s more than just a visual perception thing. There’s this whole debate over whether your mind is just in your brain or is it in your whole body. And there’s a very strong argument to be made that really your neural sensing and cognition happens throughout your entire body.
So the notion that you can just slap on a headset and shoot some photons into your eyes and somehow that takes the place of that whole-body experience that you have in the world—it’s false.
This interview predates Facebook’s big Metametamorphosis by a couple of months, but it does make some valid points about emulating the real-world experience in a virtual environment versus simply augmenting the world around us with digital overlays. While VR is aiming to replicate and reinvent the visual aspects of daily lives, it leaves out the subtler clues contributing to human perception, such as smells, touch, and our sense of equilibrium and motion. The latter is probably the hardest to recreate, and the source of the confusion many people experience while using VR headsets: the eyes show movement and motion, while the inner ear tells us we’re stationary.
As for the assertion that AR is somehow immune to the ‘viral misinformation and weird political stuff’ that have come to plague Facebook… I genuinely doubt that is true. AR and VR are in their infancy, and the early Internet and early social networks were much saner and cleaner in the beginning, simply by virtue of the small number of active people. If and when AR becomes mainstream, the incentives for bad behaviors would increase in these new mediums as well. Trolls could send out fake gathering points in AR to create congestion or drive people to some obscure location or store, which would suddenly become overwhelmed. Malicious actors could spread rumors of fires or accidents via false AR images, causing panic and real-world harm. Politicians could pay for and micro-target misleading ads, to be displayed on virtual billboards for specific audiences, just as easily as on today’s social media. And I’m quite sure people will devise new ways to abuse these new technologies that we can’t even imagine at the present moment.
Experiments showed that this change would impede the distribution of hateful, polarizing, and violence-inciting content in people’s News Feeds. But Zuckerberg rejected this intervention that could have reduced the risk of violence in the 2020 election, Haugen’s SEC filing says. An internal message characterizing Zuckerberg’s reasoning says he wanted to avoid new features that would get in the way of “meaningful social interactions”. But according to Facebook’s definition, its employees say, engagement is considered “meaningful” even when it entails bullying, hate speech, and reshares of harmful content.
This episode, like Facebook’s response to the incitement that proliferated between the election and January 6, reflects a fundamental problem with the platform. Facebook’s megascale allows the company to influence the speech and thought patterns of billions of people. What the world is seeing now, through the window provided by reams of internal documents, is that Facebook catalogs and studies the harm it inflicts on people. And then it keeps harming people anyway.
Zuckerberg’s positioning of Facebook’s role in the insurrection is odd. He lumps his company in with traditional media organizations—something he’s ordinarily loath to do, lest the platform be expected to take more responsibility for the quality of the content that appears on it—and suggests that Facebook did more, and did better, than journalism outlets in its response to January 6. What he fails to say is that journalism outlets would never be in the position to help investigators this way, because insurrectionists don’t typically use newspapers and magazines to recruit people for coups.
A subject I have not touched for some time, despite a growing number of investigations and revelations, partly because I myself have become almost completely disinterested in Facebook as a social network, partly because none of these revelations have had tangible effects on the company and its behavior. Quite the opposite, Zuckerberg apparently thinks that a rebranding will be enough to wash away any stains on his company’s image. At this point it seems that the only remedy to Facebook’s malignancy could be tough regulation in the US, its home country, as neither regulation abroad, nor vague and unenforceable privacy standards, neither Apple’s containment measures on iOS, nor employee criticism have managed to affect its ways. And yet, hoping for the divided US Congress to take firm action seems about as foolish as expecting Mark Zuckerberg to suddenly grow a conscience.
Francis Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower. Photo: Matt McClain-Pool/Getty Images
Everything distasteful about Facebook, including its unmanageable size, flows from its business model, which is infinitely scalable. Yes, we should break Facebook up, but we also must break its business model of ever more granular user surveillance. Without the urge to record, shape, and monetize users’ every thought and click, the platform’s incentives change enormously — and perhaps for the better. But Facebook is not going to give up its cash cow willingly. Only sweeping policy changes can do that — a national data privacy law, regulators that can audit algorithms and police the data trade, wholesale prohibitions on the collection and sale of certain types of personal information, outlawing targeted advertising, nationalizing some tech firms and running them as public utilities.
Looking back on its history, I think the change that snowballed into this huge mess was introducing the Timeline and making everyone’s posts public by default. This led to the massive distribution of fringe content all over people’s feeds, which the company later monetized with ads and is now unwilling to roll back to protect its lucrative business.
Facebook could ban reshares. It could consistently enforce its policies regardless of a user’s political power. It could choose to optimize its platform for safety and quality rather than for growth. It could tweak its algorithm to prevent widespread distribution of harmful content. Facebook could create a transparent dashboard so that all of its users can see what’s going viral in real time. It could make public its rules for how frequently groups can post and how quickly they can grow. It could also automatically throttle groups when they’re growing too fast, and cap the rate of virality for content that’s spreading too quickly.
Facebook could shift the burden of proof toward people and communities to demonstrate that they’re good actors—and treat reach as a privilege, not a right. Facebook could say that its platform is not for everyone. It could sound an alarm for those who wander into the most dangerous corners of Facebook, and those who encounter disproportionately high levels of harmful content. It could hold its employees accountable for preventing users from finding these too-harmful versions of the platform, thereby preventing those versions from existing.
