Facebook 2.0: Meta wants to turn our physical movements into money

When Facebook bought Oculus and its much-hyped Rift VR goggles for $2 billion in 2014, it wasn't entirely clear what the social media giant was planning with this move into virtual reality. But anyone familiar with Facebook's myriad scandals and insatiable hunger for personal data had some premonition.

Now, the not-so-long-ago unveiling of Meta, Facebook's virtual reality and augmented reality-linked rebrand, is the culmination of a vision that shouldn't really surprise you. In 2021, Facebook's social media data collection frenzy has blown the boundaries of the Internet as we know it. The company's goals now call for the creation of a new reality in which even more data about our social and physical behavior can be collected and turned into profit.

In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg described virtual reality as the next big platform - that is, a place where all our social interactions will take place with a new level of physical presence, thanks to VR headsets and motion controllers. To me, that could only mean one thing: Zuckerberg wants to create virtual worlds where you can record, predict and monetize all human behavior.

At the time, Facebook said there were "no current plans" to use data on physical movements such as head and eye movements to predict user behavior and serve up ads accordingly. Since then, the company has made logging into Facebook a mandatory requirement for using the Oculus headset, until recently reversing that decision due to intense public pressure. And in early 2021, Facebook announced its inevitable foray into VR-based advertising - causing such an outcry that one Oculus video game developer abandoned its VR advertising plans entirely.

To be sure, such opportunistic tactics are familiar enough from the company formerly known as Facebook.

But Meta's announcement shows once again that it's not possible to stop Mark Zuckerberg's plans to turn any human interactions into money-making data. The rebranding, of course, comes just when the company is under extreme criticism for becoming a global platform for misinformation and violence and, according to a whistleblower, doing little to stop it.

It is safe to assume that Meta uses the same algorithms as Facebook: Data about human behavior is collected, which is then used to build user profiles and ultimately play content to the respective users that they are more likely to interact with. Facebook itself proved the effect of this manipulation with a psychological experiment that the company secretly conducted with its users in 2012.

This form of algorithmic manipulation is the core business model of Facebook and many other social media platforms.

As one anonymous data scientist put it in a 2015 research paper: The goal of an algorithmic social media platform like Facebook, he said, is to "change people's actual behavior, identify good and bad behavior, and find ways to reward the good behavior and punish the bad."

Researchers have found that this algorithmic "nudging" is also possible in VR environments. And collecting data on body movements opens up whole new ways to influence human behavior on a large scale. Companies like RealEyes and Affectiva already offer AI systems that can supposedly predict human emotions by analyzing body language and facial expressions. However, this claim is strongly challenged by AI experts. Meanwhile, in a remarkable study, researchers have found that AI-controlled digital avatars in virtual spaces can be used to push certain political views on people.

The bottom line, then, is that Meta represents a huge investment in exactly the kind of algorithmic manipulation for which Facebook has so often been heavily criticized.

Meanwhile, the company is currently on a charm offensive to sell its new vision well. Mark Zuckerberg spent most of his meta-presentation trying to sell us on a VR-based social media platform where our avatars can live like in a utopian Sims world and fill their virtual houses with virtual objects. Otherwise, the company mainly sent out embarrassing and forced funny tweets to various popular brands with its new image.

Despite the name change, Meta can't just shake off its old Facebook image. Mark Zuckerberg's company has perfected the art of collecting and monetizing data without regard to the social consequences. And unless the Metaverse remains just another bizarre Silicon Valley air castle, Meta is sure to make this new reality just as crappy like the old one.