[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

But almost two years on, Zuckerberg's vision of the metaverse is in trouble.

In April he was forced to deny that he is now jettisoning the idea.

"A narrative has developed that we're somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse," he told investors in April. "So I just want to say upfront that that's not accurate."

On Wednesday the company holds its annual VR event called Meta Connect.

It's a chance, perhaps, for Zuckerberg to again explain his reasoning for taking an extremely profitable social media company and diverting its focus to an extremely unprofitable VR venture.

How unprofitable? Well, the most recent figures from Meta are eye-watering.

Reality Labs - which as the name suggests is Meta's virtual and augmented reality branch - has lost a staggering $21 billion since last year.

Part of the losses reflect long-term investment. Meta wasn't expecting short-term returns. But the worrying fact for the company is that, so far, there is very little evidence that this enormous punt will work.

Horizon Worlds, a game published by Meta, is about as close as the company has got to creating a metaverse.

Users can hop into different settings - cafes, comedy clubs, night clubs, basketball courts - to hang out and play games.

Meta claims it has 300,000 monthly users: tiny when compared to the billions of people on Facebook and Instagram.

And at any one time, vastly fewer people than that are actually playing the game.

User reviews complain of empty worlds, and say there simply aren't enough people to make it fun. Or if there are people, they're often children.

X, formerly Twitter, has the biggest proportion of disinformation of six big social networks, a European Commission study has suggested.

It examined over 6,000 unique social media posts across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, and YouTube.

The study analysed content in three countries deemed particularly at risk to disinformation - Spain, Poland and Slovakia.

The BBC has approached X for comment.

"My message for [X] is: you have to comply with the hard law. We'll be watching what you're doing," the EU's Values and Transparency Commissioner Vera Jourova warned

The disinformation study which prompted Ms Jourova's comments covered Spain, Poland and Slovakia, countries at risk of being targeted by disinformation due to elections or proximity to the war in Ukraine.

The platform with the largest "ratio of discoverability" of disinformation - meaning the proportion of sensitive content made up of disinformation - was Twitter. YouTube had the lowest, the study suggested.

RECENTLY, A STARTLING piece of information came to light in the ongoing antitrust case against Google. During one employee’s testimony, a key exhibit momentarily flashed on a projector. In the mostly closed trial, spectators like myself have only a few seconds to scribble down the contents of exhibits shown during public questioning. Thus far, witnesses had dropped breadcrumbs hinting at the extent of Google’s drive to boost profits: a highly confidential effort called Project Mercury, urgent missives to “shake the sofa cushions” to generate more advertising revenue on the search engine results page (SERP), distressed emails about the sustained decline in the ad-triggering searches that generate most of Google’s money, recollections of how the executive team has long insisted that obscene corporate profit equals consumer good. Now, the projector screen showed an internal Google slide about changes to its search algorithm.

I was attending the trial out of long-standing professional interest. I had previously battled Google’s legal team while at the Federal Trade Commission, and I advocated around the world for search engine competition as an executive for DuckDuckGo. I’m all too familiar with Google’s secret games and word play. With the trial practically in my backyard, I couldn’t stay away from the drama.

This onscreen Google slide had to do with a “semantic matching” overhaul to its SERP algorithm. When you enter a query, you might expect a search engine to incorporate synonyms into the algorithm as well as text phrase pairings in natural language processing. But this overhaul went further, actually altering queries to generate more commercial results.

There have long been suspicions that the search giant manipulates ad prices, and now it’s clear that Google treats consumers with the same disdain. The “10 blue links,” or organic results, which Google has always claimed to be sacrosanct, are just another vector for Google greediness, camouflaged in the company’s kindergarten colors.

Twitter continues to Twitter at quite extreme Twitter pace.

In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I wrote a piece called “Everything will be all the time and everywhere,” where I essentially used social media, but mainly Twitter, to construct a ticking clock of the first hours of the invasion. And while I was able to make some sense of the noise online, I still concluded at the time that, “our feeds aren’t meant for content like this and are breaking.” And a year and a half later, those feeds are completely broken.

As an exercise, I tried to keep track of what I was seeing online this weekend from Israel and Palestine. And it has been, of course, impossible to follow anything. My understanding of what’s going on has not just been muddled by platforms like X, but warped entirely. I know more about adult film star Mia Khalifa’s cancelation for tweeting that Hamas should shoot their videos horizontally, right-wing influencers Ben Shapiro and Andrew Tate arguing with each other about who’s tough enough to go fight in Gaza, and unfathomably racist posts from verified losers than I do about anything material that’s happening on the ground. I’ve seen so much content reported, debunked, and rebunked(?) that I think I’ve reached the limits of my mind’s ability to understand reality. To say nothing of the endless cascade of horrifying violence X is serving up via the autoplaying videos it bricks my phone’s battery with, posted by verified accounts who are actively monetizing them, whether they’re genuine or not. Surrounded by ads for hentai mobile games, of course.

And this dogsh*t content swirling inside of X is also still guiding what’s being posted everywhere else. Big subreddits and popular Instagram accounts (and legitimate digital publishers) are full of screenshots of the same stuff I’m seeing on X. If Twitter was the cultural engine of the English-speaking internet in the 2010s, it’s now spewing oil into every other part of the internet and there are no mechanisms in place to contain it. As Mashable’s Matt Binder posted today, “Nearly every thing that's gone viral on Twitter over the past few days has been wrong.”

The main framework for how large social platforms have been moderated for the last decade started getting cobbled together around 2014, after 4chan’s massive leak of non-consensual sexual material, dubbed “The Fappening,” and was really formalized in 2015, with the rise of ISIS, and, in 2016, when Facebook launched a factchecking division and acknowledged that Russia’s disinfo factory, the Internet Research Agency, was using the platform to meddle in foreign elections. One by one, major corporate platforms began to accept that they had a responsibility and a duty to protect users from spam, scams, misinformation and disinformation, harassment, abuse, illegal and malicious material, and extremism. And they, of course, failed to uphold that responsibility time and time again. But these companies did hire a bunch of former Obama staffers and made them non-apologize to reporters every time one of their products caused a genocide. Which is nice.

We also now know that the “moderation” these companies kept pledging to increase via sophisticated AI tools was actually just being outsourced to literal sweatshops in countries like Kenya and South Africa where workers make dollars a day viewing the worst content imaginable until they psychologically can’t take it anymore. An experience that Musk, with his infinite business acumen, is now providing to any X user that accidentally clicks on the app’s For You tab. Or worse, he’s outsourced misinformation to the wannabe Wikipedia editors running his Community Notes feature, which completely broke this weekend. Though, it did manage to fire off this incredible debunk before it got clogged up with Arma 3 gameplay videos.

It’s clear now that these companies were only ever going to clean up their platforms to a point and, as we’re now learning, it was only temporary. Musk recently shut down an internal misinformation tool called Smyte and liquidated X’s election integrity team. Meta’s Threads doesn’t even have one. And YouTube and Meta have largely given up on moderating conspiracy theories. The only institution still in the moderation game, it seems, is the European Union. EU commissioner Thierry Breton served Musk with a letter yesterday giving him 24 hours to comply with a request for information on how Twitter is upholding the EU’s Digital Services Act, which has strict rules for how platforms handle misinfo and extremist material. Musk is currently trying to bait the EU into publicly posting out a list of violations it thinks X has allowed, likely because he knows his supporters will dogpile EU officials. Breton responded by posting his Bluesky username lol.

This is where you say, “So what? It’s the internet. Read a news site if you want a clear understanding of the world.” To which The Atlantic Council’s Emerson T. Brooking replied, “Boo-hoo, Twitter’s dead, whatever — except that X remains the preferred platform for policymakers. And what they believe affects millions.” When Musk bought Twitter a year ago, I naively believed that users, especially irl important ones, would react to the increasing noise on their feeds by simply leaving the platform. And, if my own following tab is an indication, many have. But what has actually happened is much more dangerous. Instead of X dissolving into a digital backwater for divorced guys with NFT debt, it has, instead, continued to remain at the top of the digital funnel while also being 4chan-levels of rotten. It is still being used to process current events in “real time” even though it does not have the tools, nor the leadership necessary to handle that responsibility. The inmates are running the asylum and there is nothing on the horizon to convince that that will get better.

And so I think I’m ready to finally face the facts: Community moderation, in almost every form, should be considered a failed project. Our public digital spaces, as they currently exist, cannot be fixed and the companies that control them cannot, or, more likely, will not ensure their safety or quality at a scale that matters anymore. And the main tactic for putting pressure on these companies — reporters and researchers highlighting bad moderation and trust and safety failures and the occasional worthless congressional hearing playing whack-a-mole with offensive content — has amounted to little more than public policy LARPing. We are right back where we started in 2012, but in much more online world. And the companies that built that world have abandoned us to go play with AI.