When Facebook acquired the Oculus company and their Rift headset for $ 2 billion back in 2014, it wasn’t entirely clear why. What aim did the social media giant have on the newly resurrected frontier of virtual reality? For those already keeping track of Facebook’s scandals and appetite for other people’s personal data, though, it wasn’t that hard to guess.
Meta’s announcement
The virtual reality and augmented reality-oriented rebranding operation of the company previously known as Facebook — is the apotheosis of a vision that was obvious from the start. In 2021, Facebook’s social data colonization eclipsed the internet as we know it, and its ambitions now demand the creation of a new reality where intimate data about our social behaviors and physical actions can be collected and exploited for profit.
During a tech demo in 2016, CEO Mark Zuckerberg described VR as “the next great computing platform” — a space where all social interactions will develop with new levels of physical presence thanks to headsets and motion-controllers. As I wrote at the time, this could only mean one thing: Zuckerberg wants to build virtual environments where every human action can be recorded, predicted and monetized. Later, however, they made it mandatory to log in with Facebook for Oculus Rift users — an obligation that was announced to be revoked in October 2021. And, in early 2021, the company announced its (inevitable) debut in the world of VR ads – sparking very negative reactions.
As much as the decoy is a classic move by the company formerly known as Facebook, Meta’s announcement demonstrates that there is no way to stop Zuckerberg’s plans to extract data from every human interaction in the world and then monetize it. . The metamorphosis comes just right when society is under trial for the role it has played in spreading disinformation and violence around the world, following whistleblower Frances Haugen complaints
How the Metaverse will monetize every human action
We can assume that Meta will have the same predictive algorithms (from a function point of view) as its predecessor. Human behavior data will be collected, which will then be used to build user profiles and automatically prioritize the content they are most likely to interact with. Facebook itself demonstrated the effectiveness of this manipulation with the “emotional contagion” experiment conducted in secret on users in 2012: changing a user’s feed from positive to negative content altered the type of content a user would post more. Even with the music industry, people believe that Meta will collaborate with the music apps like Spotify and SoundCloud. They will monetize people using Spotify through Meta. Experts believe that it will be a big help to the musicians and they may not be wrong. As of now, you can buy Spotify playlist followers and get better results with the marketing campaign.
