How to fix Big Tech and Social Media

[Jacob]

Did you guys see how apparently OAN is basically funded by AT&T?

[Admiral Yi]

AT&T is pushing back. In a statement to Deadline's Dade Hayes, AT&T said it "never had a financial interest in OAN's success and does not 'fund' OAN. When AT&T acquired DirecTV, we refused to carry OAN on that platform, and OAN sued DirecTV as a result. Four years ago, DirecTV reached a commercial carriage agreement with OAN, as it has with hundreds of other channels and as OAN has done with the other TV providers that carry its programming."

https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2021/is-att-backing-one-america-news/

I had not so I looked it up.

I own AT&T stock. 

[Sheilbh]

I wonder if this is less about big tech and social media (I think there are other issues there) - and if it's maybe the mainstreaming of internet/very online culture.

I am too old to use Tik Tok - but I saw this article on "couch guy":
https://www.cnet.com/news/who-is-couch-guy-on-tiktok-the-internets-latest-obsession-explained/

Basically there was a Tik Tok of a girl surprising her college boyfriend with some sappy music on top - he looks a bit shocked and gets up slowly to hug her. Since then #couchguy hashtagged videos have over 650 million views. It's broken into two broad streams: one is second-by-second breakdowns of the video with all couch guy's questionable behaviour and red flags (he's sat on a couch with three girls, does the girl he's next to slip him his phone? why?); the other is parodies (guy who's clearly not overjoyed to see his girlfriend, guy surrounded by women cooing over him greeting his girlfriend; and, inevitably, meta-parodies of the true crime sleuthing). There's now also people doing their own surprise reunion videos as well as push back against the "couch guy is cheating scum" discourse.

This isn't directly related to politics or anything you guys have been talking about. But the first video posted about two weeks and has already blown up and (as someone smarter than me on Twitter) pointed out something about social media is that it creates the content and the theories and the analysis (hello languish! ) and the conspiracies that you used to need an entire dedicated community to do- 4chan, subreddits etc. This is created more or less spontaneously and instantly. And if you go back beyond the 4chan/subreddit communities you'd find the fringe UFO or Jim Garrison JFK world where images of a UFO or the Zapruder film were microanalysed by obsessives.

I think when social media emerged the expectation of its creators and all of us as users was that it would be a new way of communicating but it would be our world going online. What, I think, has happened is actually we have mainstreamed the very online culture that was once primarily populated by shut-ins and other internet eccentrics. That is now a large part of online discourse and I think that drives a lot of these issues - trolling, disinformation, extremism, conspiracy-mindedness etc. It's what used to be a very niche and quite guarded online world (like Languish) becoming one of the main streams of the internet.

I don't think it's very healthy for us generally, but I do regularly think that stuff I see reminds me of a subreddit gone rogue except it's now massive.

[viper37]

Did you guys see how apparently OAN is basically funded by AT&T?

Yes.  And I'm not convinced this report is entirely fact-based.  Not without some more evidence than the testimony of a known liar.

[Razgovory]

I still think the novelty of people falling into echo chambers and the evil influences is overstated, so I am with The Brain on this one.

Sure, there are people who actually believe Hillary Clinton ran a pedo ring from a pizza place but are they really a bigger portion of the populace than, say, followers of Scientology? And the "milder" form of Trumpism where everything not supporting their ignorant narrative is a lie - I hate to break it to you people but that's how a lot of people thought about politics before the Internet. You just weren't aware of it. If this level of ignorance can overtake half your country the problem perhaps is not with Facebook.

Yes, people who believe that Hillary Clinton is a blood thirty cannibal is much greater than people who believe in Scientology.  15 percent of the American public believe that the world is run by satanic pedophiles. There's about 40,000 scientologists worldwide.

[Eddie Teach]

Ok, but the Scientologists have more power and possibly more money than that 15%. 

[Savonarola]

Someone really should have told Mark Zuckerberg that Neuromancer is supposed to be a dystopian science fiction novel, not a business plan:

Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name
Mark Zuckerberg wants to be known for building the METAVERSE!

Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the METAVERSE!, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company's annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant's ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.

Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware like AR glasses that Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that, over the next several years, "we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a METAVERSE! company."

A rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today. A former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the US and elsewhere are trying to break the company up, and public trust in how Facebook does business is falling.

Facebook isn't the first well-known tech company to change its company name as its ambitions expand. In 2015, Google reorganized entirely under a holding company called Alphabet, partly to signal that it was no longer just a search engine, but a sprawling conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health tech. And Snapchat rebranded to Snap Inc. in 2016, the same year it started calling itself a "camera company" and debuted its first pair of Spectacles camera glasses.

I'm told that the new Facebook company name is a closely-guarded secret within its walls and not known widely, even among its full senior leadership. A possible name could have something to do with Horizon, the name of the still-unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing for the past few years. The name of that app was recently tweaked to Horizon Worlds shortly after Facebook demoed a version for workplace collaboration called Horizon Workrooms.

FACEBOOK HAS BEEN LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR A BRANDING CHANGE
Aside from Zuckerberg's comments, Facebook has been steadily laying the groundwork for a greater focus on the next generation of technology. This past summer it set up a dedicated METAVERSE! team. More recently, it announced that the head of AR and VR, Andrew Bosworth, will be promoted to chief technology officer. And just a couple of days ago Facebook announced plans to hire 10,000 more employees to work on the METAVERSE! in Europe.

The METAVERSE! is "going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet," Zuckerberg told The Verge's Casey Newton this summer. "And I think it's going to be the next big chapter for our company too, really doubling down in this area."

Complicating matters is that, while Facebook has been heavily promoting the idea of the METAVERSE! in recent weeks, it's still not a concept that's widely understood. The term was coined originally by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual world people escape to from a dystopian, real world. Now it's being adopted by one of the world's largest and most controversial companies — and it'll have to explain why its own virtual world is worth diving into.

But don't worry Facebook (or whatever it will be called) will build a responsible METAVERSE!   

[Eddie Teach]

I hope the exclamation marks are yours...

[Savonarola]

I hope the exclamation marks are yours...

They're implied in the original article and Facebook page.

[Sheilbh]

And inspired by Darren Aronofsky's mother!

[grumbler]

I'm doubting that the name change in the article is real.  First of all, it's incredibly dumb-sounding, and secondly, it is unlikely that a new name not even known to the senior executives is going to be leaked to The Verge.

[Syt]

I don't think that Metaverse is going to be the new brand name (it seems to come from the Zuck quote mentioned in the article).

It might indeed be a move like Google, where everything is under Alphabet, but the existing brands are what the average consumer interacts with.

[Jacob]

Yeah, as I understand it "metaverse" (or "METAVERSE!") is the buzz-word describing the new... uh... tech paradigm? Like Web 2.0, IoT, Cyberspace, Virtual Reality et. al.

Personally, I'm expecting the rebranded name to be METAFACE, with MetaZUCK being the runner up.

[Syt]

I actually kind of hope they go for MEGACORP or something.

[Barrister]

Zuckerberg is a big enough nerd he should go with Compu Global Hyper Meganet.