Twitter is expanding its premium subscription service to more users. Twitter Blue, which unlocks additional features like the ability to “undo” a tweet or browse news without ads, is now available to users in the United States ($2.99/month) and New Zealand ($4.49/month).

The service is designed to appeal to Twitter’s most dedicated power users, with the kind of specialized features that have sometimes appeared in third-party Twitter clients. For example, Twitter Blue comes with an “undo” feature that’s likely the closest thing to an edit button the company will ever make.

A subscription also buys several new customization tools, including the ability to rearrange which features appear as shortcuts in the app’s navigation bar, or the option to choose new color themes and app icons. Subscriptions also buy you early access to new features as Twitter tests them out. For now that includes video upload up to 10 minutes long (videos are capped at 2 minutes for non-paying users) and the ability to pin conversations to the top of your DM inbox. These experimental features “might eventually become available to the rest of Twitter, graduate to a feature of Twitter Blue, or sunset based on feedback we hear from subscribers,” the company says.

Twitter

Notably, the latest iteration of Twitter Blue also comes with two new features powered by the company’s recent acquisition of Scroll, a startup that partnered with publishers to offer ad-free content. Twitter Blue subscribers are now able to access ad-free articles from more than 300 publishers, including The Atlantic, BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone.

It’s somewhat similar to Google’s AMP or Facebook’s Instant Articles in that articles are meant to load quickly and cleanly. But unlike those programs, where readers are directed to stripped down article pages, Twitter Blue articles will still open directly on the publisher’s website. Tony Haile, the former Scroll CEO who now is the senior director of longform at Twitter, says the company is trying to build “win-win partnerships” with publishers who retain “complete control of the experience.”

Though the company hasn’t disclosed the terms of these arrangements, a portion of each Twitter Blue subscription goes directly to publishers, Haile said. And subscribers will also get access to a dashboard in the Twitter app that breaks down your news-reading habits and how much revenue your clicks are bringing to the publishers you read most often. “Our goal is to help each publishing partner make 50% more per person than they would’ve made from serving ads to that person.” Twitter writes in a blog post.

Twitter

Finally, Twitter Blue comes with a “top articles” feature that brings in some functionality from the niche but highly regarded news app Nuzzel, which was shuttered earlier this year. Like the original app, the new “top articles” feature will curate a list of the top stories shared by people in your Twitter network over the last 24 hours. (Former Nuzzel fans will be happy to learn they can pin the new “top articles” section directly to their nav bar from the in-app settings menu.)

The expansion of Twitter Blue comes amid a broader shift for the company, which has been shaking up many of its core features for the first time in its 15-year history. Elsewhere, the company has embraced creator-centric features like Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces, and is building out a newsletter platform. Twitter Blue is different, though, because the company is hoping to draw in its most hardcore users rather than attract new voices to its platform.

But it’s unclear just how many of those users will be willing to pay for those extra features. The company has been testing Twitter Blue in Australia and Canada since early June, but hasn’t shared on early adoption or other metrics for the service, Twitter said Tuesday it will continue to add new features and will be paying close attention to user feedback.

Netflix will roll out a new TikTok-inspired featured that specifically targets its younger viewers this week, according to Bloomberg. The streaming giant is reportedly launching "Kids Clip" on its iOS app, which will show short video clips from its library of children's programming to help young viewers find something to watch. Bloomberg says the feature builds upon Fast Laughs, the comedy feed it launched earlier this year. 

Unlike Fast Laughs, however, Kids Clips videos will be horizontal instead of vertical and will take over the entire screen. In addition, kids will only be able to view 10 to 20 clips at any one time. Netflix will add new clips every day based on the current shows and movies available on the platform, as well as future ones slated to arrive on the service. Both features are part of the company's efforts to combat decision fatigue, which ails many of its subscribers. Netflix also launched a shuffle play feature called Play Something back in October to help viewers find something to watch based on their viewing patterns without having to scroll endlessly through the app. 

Netflix still refers Kids Clips as a "test," Bloomberg said, and it won't be available to all its users just yet. For now, it's rolling out in select markets, including the US, Canada, Australia, Ireland and Latin American countries. 

Facebook is bringing monetization features into yet another part of its service: groups. The social network is testing new tools that allow group admins to make money, with new shopping, fundraising and subscription features.

The company announced the updates at its annual Communities Summit event, where it said the new features will help people who run groups “sustain” the communities they have built. With the changes, Facebook is group admins three ways to monetize their communities. The first two, community shops and fundraisers, mirror features elsewhere on the platform. Community shops is an extension of Facebook’s existing features, and allows group admins to sell themed merch or other goods. Likewise, fundraisers will enable admins to crowdfund specific projects or otherwise “offset the costs of running the group.”

But the third feature is entirely new: paid subgroups. Subgroups are essentially smaller groups-within-a-group where members pay a monthly fee to participate. While Facebook is also allowing group admins to set up free subgroups, the paid version of the feature is the company’s latest effort to create subscription-based products. Elsewhere, Facebook has been hyping subscriptions as a way for creators to make money, either via newsletters or fan subscriptions for streamers. In the context of groups, subscriptions are meant to enable access to exclusive or specialized content like “coaching or networking or deeper conversations.”

Facebook

Maria Smith, Facebook’s VP of Communities says that Facebook doesn’t expect all groups will want or need paid features, but that many groups already sell their own merch or organize fundraisers. So bringing the tools directly to them could be useful. On the other hand, groups have also been home to Facebook’s most toxic and divisive content, and the company has at times struggled to keep problematic groups in check.

Given Facebook’s track record here, it feels almost inevitable that some groups will find a way to misuse these tools (Facebook is planning a slow rollout, so most groups won’t have access to these features right away.) Smith notes that subgroups will have the same moderation tools as the wider group and that it could in some cases make it easier for admin to handle. “It’s going to classify the discussions in the different subgroups and then they can manage them more efficiently,” she said. She added that groups and subgroups will also be required to follow the company’s commerce guidelines and fundraising rules.

As much as groups have been maligned, the feature is also the one that Facebook frequently points to as proof that its platform can bring people together and be a force for good. Facebook has also indicated that groups will play an important role in its plan to build a metaverse. “We're focused on building bridges from our apps on 2D screens into more immersive virtual experiences,” Mark Zuckerberg said at the start of Thursday’s event. “Facebook, and your groups, are going to be central to this.”

Zuckerberg is still explaining what a Metaverse means for the social network and the company now known as Meta. But it’s not hard to imagine that today’s Facebook groups could one day inhabit virtual spaces within the metaverse, though that vision is still “a ways off,” says Smith.

In addition to the new monetization features, Facebook announced several other updates for groups, including:

• New customization features that allow admins to change background colors, font styles and other aspects of the way groups look

• Community chats to make it easier for admins and group moderators to reach each other

• A new “featured” section so group admins can pin content that stays at the top of the group

• Facebook also plans to start testing a new set of features that will streamline the groups and Pages experience for admins who manage both a group and a corresponding page. It’s still not totally clear exactly how this will work, but Facebook says the goal is to bring some group-specific features, like moderation tools, into Pages while also giving admins the ability to “use an official voice when interacting with their community.”

You no longer have to tap an Instagram link in Twitter to see what you'll get. Twitter has started rolling out preview cards for Instagram links in its official apps and the web. If someone shares an Insta post, you'll see a thumbnail of the imagery you can expect when you tap that link. You may know if a photo is like-worthy without leaving your Twitter timeline.

The move puts an end to a long-running feud. Instagram's Twitter photo integration vanished in 2012, and neither social network has had a strong incentive to use preview cards in the years since. Twitter would rather you post photos directly on its service, while Instagram clearly has motivations to keep you using its platform whenever possible. Those issues apparently aren't much of a problem at this stage.

It's not clear what prompted the decision. We've asked Instagram for comment. Either way, it's good news if you're a social media fan — there should be less guesswork and more attention for your posts.

Facebook is rolling out another bonus program as it tries to bring more creators into its platform. This time, the company is focusing on subscriptions, which it says will help creators avoid Apple’s 30 percent commission on in-app purchases.

The social network is launching a web form for subscriptions, so individual creators can direct fans to subscribe outside of the app using Facebook Pay rather than Apple’s in-app purchases. “When people subscribe using this link, creators will keep all the money they earn (minus taxes),” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post.

Additionally, the company is introducing a bonus program that will pay creators between $5 and $20 for each new subscriber who signs up between now and the end of the year. Creators can earn up to $10,000 in bonuses, Facebook wrote in a blog post. The new bonus program is “invite-only in all 27 markets where the subscriptions feature is available to creators,” Facebook said, noting it wants to expand the program to more people “in the coming months.”

Facebook

Zuckerberg, who has had a long-running feud with Apple, has made the so-called “App Store tax” one of his top talking points about the iPhone maker. The company already created a workaround for businesses to circumvent in-app purchases for paid events, and has told creators Facebook won’t take a cut of their earnings until 2023. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said creators would also be able to download their subscriber lists in order to have “more ownership of their audience.”

Winning over creators has become an increasingly important priority for Facebook, which already announced plans to funnel $1 billion into creator programs by the end of next year. The company sees creators as key to fending off rivals like TikTok and YouTube, and winning back the “young adult” demographic. Newly disclosed documents show that Facebook and Instagram are facing increasing declines in the number of younger users on its platform. The trend has worried executives and stumped researchers, who have so far been unable to turn the numbers around.

Despite Facebook’s attempts at verifying suspiciously popular accounts, it isn’t perfect (to say the least). The Verge has reported that the company has mistakenly verified a Facebook fan page for Elon Musk as Musk’s own official account. On top of that, it appears to be run by a Bitcoin scammer.

The page, which has 153,000 followers as of this writing, actually acknowledges it isn't Musk... at least in the About section. It says there: “This is a fanpage, uploading tweets etc from him.” But then the URL ends in "ElonMuskoffici", which indicates they're certainly pretending as if it's official. In the Page Transparency section, it says that the people who manage the page are “based in Egypt,” not in the US, which is where Musk resides.

Engadget

The account currently has 11 posts, and while most of them are just reposts of Musk’s tweets, the most recent one is clearly a phony Bitcoin giveaway (the post has since been removed). The earliest is on October 21st, but as The Verge pointed out, the page was actually created on July 28th 2019 under the name “Kizito Gavin” with several name changes since then. It changed its name to Elon Musk on October 17th.

Facebook verification requires account owners to submit proof of their identity, such as driver's license or passport, but scammers have at times found ways around the official process.

We’ve reached out to Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, for comment, but have not received a response just yet. 

Facebook (and now, Meta) might just be experiencing its most sustained and intense bout of bad press ever, thanks to whistleblower Frances Haugen and the thousands of documents she spirited out of the company.

The Wall Street Journal was the first publication to report on the contents of the documents, which have also been turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since then, the documents have made their way into the hands of more than a dozen publications who formed “a consortium,” much to the dismay of Facebook’s PR department.

There have now been more than a hundred stories based on the documents. And while many of those reference the same documents, the details are significant. But as important as they are, it’s also a dizzying amount of information. There are detailed documents written by the company's researchers, free-form notes and memos, as well as comments and other posts in Workplace, the internal version of Facebook used by its employees.

This mix of sources, together with the fact that the consortium has not released most of the documents to researchers or other journalists, makes the Facebook Papers difficult to parse. Gizmodo has been publishing some of the underlying documents, but new revelations could be trickling out for weeks or months as the material becomes more widely distributed.

But amid all that noise, a few key themes have emerged, many of which have also been backed up by prior reporting on the company and its policies. This article will detail Haugen’s disclosures, and additional details that have arisen from reporting on the Facebook Papers. We'll continue to update it as fresh allegations emerge.

Facebook allowed politics to influence its decisions

This likely won’t be a surprise to anyone who has followed Facebook over the last five years or so, but the Facebook Papers add new evidence to years-long allegations that Mark Zuckerberg and other company leaders allowed politics to influence their decisions.

One of the first stories to break from Haugen’s disclosures (via The Wall Street Journal) included details about Facebook’s “cross check” program, which allowed politicians, celebrities and other VIPs to skirt the company’s rules. The initial motivation for the program? To avoid the “PR fires” that may occur if the social network were to mistakenly remove something from a famous person’s account. In another document, also reported byThe Journal, a researcher on Facebook's integrity team complained that the company had made “special exceptions” for right-wing publisher Brietbart. The publication, part of Facebook’s official News Tab, also had “managed partner” status, which may have helped the company avoid consequences for sharing misinformation.

At the same time, while Facebook’s policies were often perceived internally as putting their thumb on the scale in favor of conservatives, Zuckerberg has also been accused of shelving ideas that could have been perceived as benefiting Democrats. The CEO was personally involved in killing a proposal to put a Spanish language version of its voting information center into WhatsApp ahead of the 2020 presidential election, The Washington Post reported. Zuckerberg reportedly said the plan wasn’t “politically neutral.”

Facebook has serious moderation failures outside the US and Europe

Some of the most damning revelations in the Facebook Papers relate to how the social network handles moderation and safety issues in countries outside of the United States and Europe. The mere fact that Facebook is prone to overlook countries that make up its “rest of world” metrics is not necessarily new. The company's massive failure in Myanmar, where Facebook-fueled hate helped incite a genocide, has been well documented for years.

Yet a 2020 document noted the company still has “significant gaps” in its ability to detect hate speech and other rule-breaking content on its platform. According to Reuters, the company’s AI detection tools — known as “classifiers” — aren’t able to identify misinformation in Burmese. (Again, it’s worth pointing out that a 2018 report on Facebook’s role in the genocide in Myanmar cited viral misinformation and the lack of Burmese-speaking content moderators as issues the company should address.)

Unfortunately, Myanmar is far from the only country where Facebook’s under-investment in moderation has contributed to real-world violence. CNN notes that Facebook’s own employees have been warning that the social network is being abused by “problematic actors” to incite violence in Ethiopia. Yet Facebook lacked the automated tools to detect hate speech and other inciting content even though it had determined the country was one of the most “at risk” countries.

Even in India — Facebook’s largest market — there’s a lack of adequate language support and resources to enforce the platform’s rules. In one document, reported byThe New York Times, a researcher created a test account as an Indian user and started following Facebook’s automated recommendations for accounts and pages to follow. It took just three weeks for a new user’s feed to become flooded with “hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence.” At the end of the experiment, the researcher wrote: “I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life.” The report was not an outlier. Facebook groups and WhatsApp messages are being used to “spread religious hatred” in the country, according to The Wall Street Journal’s analysis of several internal documents.

Facebook has misled authorities and the public about its worst problems

Lawmakers, activists and other watchdogs have long suspected that Facebook knows far more about issues like misinformation, radicalization and other major problems than it publicly lets on. But many documents within the Facebook Papers paint a startling picture of just how much the company’s researchers know, often long before issues have boiled over into major scandals. That knowledge is often directly at odds with what company officials have publicly claimed.

For example, in the days after the Jan. 6 insurrection, COO Sheryl Sandberg said that rioters had “largely” organized using other platforms, not Facebook. Yet a report from the company’s own researchers, which first surfaced in April, found that the company had missed a number of warning signs about the brewing “Stop the Steal” movement. Though the company had spent months preparing for a chaotic election, including the potential for violence, organizers were able to evade Facebook’s rules by using disappearing Stories and other tactics, according to BuzzFeed.

Likewise, Facebook’s researchers were internally sounding the alarm about QAnon more than a year before the company banned the conspiracy movement. A document titled “Carol’s Journey to QAnon” detailed how a “conservative mom” could see QAnon and other conspiracy theories takeover their News Feed in just five days only by liking Pages that Facebook’s algorithms recommended. “Carol’s” experience was hardly an outlier. Researchers ran these types of experiments for years, and repeatedly found that Facebook’s algorithmic recommendations could push users deeper into conspiracies. But much of this research was not acted on until “things had spiraled into a dire state,” one researcher wrote in a document reported by NBC News.

The documents also show how Facebook has misleadingly characterized its ability to combat hate speech. The company has long faced questions about how hate speech spreads on its apps, and the issue sparked a mass advertiser boycott last year. According to a document cited by Haugen, the company’s own engineers estimate that the company is taking action on “as little as 3-5% of hate” on its platform. That’s in stark contrast to the statistics the company typically showcases.

Similarly, the Facebook Papers indicate that Facebook’s researchers knew much more about vaccine and COVID-19 misinformation than they would share with the public or officials. The company declined to answer lawmakers’ questions about how COVID-19 misinformation spreads even though, according to The Washington Post’s reporting, “researchers had deep knowledge of how covid and vaccine misinformation moved through the company’s apps.”

Facebook has misled advertisers and shareholders

These are the allegations that could end up being some of the most consequential because they show serious problems affecting the company’s core business — and could tie into any future SEC action.

Instagram has long been viewed as a bright spot for Facebook in terms of attracting the teens and younger users Facebook needs to grow. But increasingly, teens and younger users are spending more time and creating more content in competing apps like TikTok. The issue is even more stark for Facebook, where “teen and young adult DAU [daily active users] has been in decline since 2012/2013,” according to a slide shared byBloomberg.

The story points out another issue that could get the company into hot water with the SEC: that the company is overcharging advertisers and misrepresenting the size of its user base due to the number of duplicate accounts. Though this is hardly the first time the issue has been raised, the company’s own reports suggest Facebook “undercounts” the metric, known as SUMA (single user multiple account), according to Bloomberg.

Zuckerberg prioritized growth over safety

While the Facebook Papers are far from the first time the company has faced accusations that it puts profit ahead of users’ wellbeing, the documents have shed new light on many of those claims. One point that’s come up repeatedly in the reporting is Zuckerberg’s obsession with MSI, or meaningful social interaction. Facebook retooled its News Feed around the metric in 2018 as a strategy to combat declining engagement. But the decisions, meant to make sure Facebook users were seeing more content from friends and family, also made the News Feed angrier and more toxic.

By optimizing for “engagement,” publishers and other groups learned they could effectively game the company’s algorithms by, well, pissing people off. But politicians learned they could reach more people by posting more negative content, according to The Wall Street Journal. Publishers also complained that the platform was incentivizing more negative and polarizing content. Yet when Zuckerberg was presented with a proposal that found reducing the amount of some re-shared content could reduce misinformation, the CEO “said he didn’t want to pursue it if it reduced user engagement.”

That wasn’t the only time a Facebook leader was unwilling to make changes that could have a detrimental effect on engagement, even if it would address other serious issues like misinformation. Several documents detail research and concerns about Facebook’s “like” button and other reactions.

Because the News Feed algorithm prioritized a “reaction” more than a like, it boosted content that received the “angry” reaction even though researchers flagged that these posts were much more likely to be toxic. “Facebook for three years systematically amped up some of the worst of its platform, making it more prominent in users’ feeds and spreading it to a much wider audience,” The Washington Post wrote. The company finally stopped giving extra weight to “angry” last September.

Facebook slow-walked, and in some cases outright killed, proposals from researchers about how to address the flood of anti-vaccine comments on its platform, the APreported.

The company has also been accused of downplaying research that found Instagram can exacerbate mental health issues for some of its teen users. The documents, which were some of the first records to emerge from Haugen’s disclosures, forced Facebook to “pause” work on an Instagram Kids app that had already drawn the attention of 44 state Attorneys General. The research also prompted the first Congressional hearing as a result of Haugen's whistleblowing. 

What does all this mean for Facebook Meta?

While the Facebook Papers contain a dizzying amount of details about Facebook’s failures and misdeeds, many of the claims are not entirely new allegations. And if there’s one thing Facebook’s history has taught us, it’s that the company has never let a scandal affect its ability to make billions of dollars.

But, there are some signs that Haugen’s disclosures could be different. For one, she has turned over the documents to the SEC, which has the authority to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the company’s actions. As many experts have pointed out, it’s not clear what could actually come from such an investigation, but it could at the very least force Facebook’s top executives to formally answer detailed questions from the regulator.

And though Haugen has said she is not in favor of antitrust action against the social network, the FTC has reportedly begun to take a look at the disclosures. (The FTC is already in the midst of a legal battle with Facebook.) Facebook already seems to be reacting as well. The company has asked employees to preserve documents going back to 2016, The New York Times reported this week. There are other, more practical, issues too. The company is reportedly struggling to recruit engineering talent, according to documents reported by Protocol.

The constant scandals and internal roadblocks have also taken a toll on existing employees. For as much scrutiny as the company has faced externally, the Facebook Papers paint a picture of a company whose employees are at times deeply divided and frustrated. The events of January 6th in particular sparked a heated debate about Facebook’s role, and how it missed opportunities to recognize the threat of the “Stop the Steal Movement.” But there have been fundamental disagreements between researchers and other staffers, and Facebook’s leaders for years.

As Wiredpoints out, the Facebook Papers are full of “badge posts” — Facebook speak for the companywide posts employees write upon their departure from the social network — from “dedicated employees who have concluded that change will not come, or who are at least are too burned out to continue fighting for it.”

Vaccine misinformation has been pervasive issue on Facebook for years, and it wasn't until earlier this year that the website finally introduced policies that would address the problem. Now, the social network has expanded those policies and its COVID-19 vaccination efforts to include kids shortly after the FDA authorized the emergency use of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for children ages five to eleven.

In the coming weeks, it will send in-feed English and Spanish reminders to users in the US that the COVID-19 vaccine is now available for kids. Those reminders will also include a link that'll help users find the nearest vaccination site. Perhaps, more importantly, it will expand its anti-vaccine misinformation policies to remove claims that COVID-19 vaccines for kids do not exist and that the vaccine for children is untested. It will also remove any claim that COVID-19 vaccines can kill or seriously harm kids, that they're not effective for children at all and that anything other than a COVID-19 vaccine can inoculate children against the virus. 

Facebook says its fight against vaccine misinformation is part of an ongoing effort in partnership with the CDC, WHO and other health authorities. It promises to keep on updating its policies and ban any new claim about the COVID-19 vaccine for children that will emerge in the future. The website, which now operates under its parent company Meta, says it has removed more than 20 million pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram since the beginning of the pandemic. As of August 2021, it has also banned 3,000 accounts, groups and pages for repeatedly breaking its health misinformation policies. 

Facebook

For most of this year, Facebook has been talking about its plans for the metaverse, pledging to lose a lot of money in order to bolster its ambitions in the space. Yesterday, the company announced that it would rebrand its corporate identity to “Meta” in order to double down on this commitment. (And, you know, the other reason.) The metaverse, as Meta describes it, “is a new phase of interconnected virtual experiences using technologies like virtual and augmented reality.” Given the number of companies who are now starting to talk about the metaverse in very real terms, we have to answer one, very obvious question: What the Hell is a metaverse?

Everything that follows is, to a certain extent, meant to be read with the right number of ahs, ahems, polite coughs and other caveats. After all, a number of companies have started using the term in order to bask in the reflected glory thrown out by the metaverse hype train. Much like “Web 2.0,” “The metaverse” has a loosey-goosey definition that is being used to define whatever is coming next for the internet. A virtual world that mirrors our own? Metaverse. A way to buy and sell NFTs of Elon Musk dressed as a dog? Metaverse. A new way of creating commerce and communications? Metaverse. It’s likely that when we look back at the metaverse a decade or two from now, should it actually happen, it’ll look vastly different to what its boosters predict.

In his Founders Letter, CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes the metaverse as “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.” He goes on to talk about how “in this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up.” And then cites the benefits of that, including a reduced carbon footprint and less time stuck in traffic.

The easiest and most obvious point of comparison is the metaverse as represented in pop culture. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (where the term originates), Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix are all examples of this virtual, digital-world-that-actually-mirrors-our-own. Those with (long) internet memories will recall projects like Second Life, which promised to do this sort of thing 18 years ago. And some folks have suggested that Roblox and Fortnite, which are both games and virtual spaces where stuff other than games takes place, are forms of metaverse.

Meta’s interest is clear as a way of building out its work in the virtual space through its acquisition of Oculus. Sir Nick Clegg, who after his political defenestration and inexplicable Knighting became Facebook’s vice president of Global Affairs and Communications in 2018, wrote that the metaverse is designed to create a “greater sense of ‘virtual presence.’” The Guardian reported that Clegg claims to use Meta’s virtual presence service, Horizon Workrooms, to take his “Monday morning meetings in the metaverse with a virtual table and whiteboard.” You may be thinking, then, that the metaverse will be little more than Zoom but with a requirement to spend more to own some pricey VR gear.

Alexandru Voica, Meta’s Technology Communications Manager in Europe, says that a better way to understand the metaverse is as “the next evolution of the internet.” He used the video call we were on as an example of something that the metaverse could hopefully improve. “We’re meeting in this 2D video call, and it’s great compared to a phone call but it’s not as good as if we were sitting together [in the real world],” he said, “The idea is, how can you take this interaction and get it as close to you and I being together [in a public space].” He added that the metaverse wasn’t envisioned as supplanting real-world connections, but to make virtual experiences more lifelike.

Voica added that these virtual engagements will feel a lot more real with the use of technologies like VR, AR and spatial audio. When you have a series of boxes on a Zoom screen, for instance, it’s harder for your brain to process all of that information at once. In the virtual world, with people’s audio directed toward you from wherever their avatar is sitting, it’s easier for you to engage.

Some of this feeds back to Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Next Decade’ manifesto from the start of 2020, where improvements in AR and VR technology will better empower remote work. Obviously that was before COVID-19 made remote work a necessity for millions of people, and before it became one of the defining culture-war non-issues this year.

Another common frame of reference is Matthew Ball’s essay on what a metaverse is from January 2020. At the time, he said that any metaverse would be a persistent and synchronous virtual environment with its own economy. Ball added that the metaverse would enable “would-be laborers” to “participate in the ‘high value’ economy via virtual labor.” He cited the practice of Gold Farming — where players of a large MMO in a low-wage country works for hours to earn large amounts of virtual currency (or goods) which they then sell on to other players for real-world cash — as a current example of this “virtual labor.”

Kevin Dietsch via Getty Images

Ball went on to say that the metaverse would also offer “unprecedented interoperability of data.” A user would be able to move objects freely between worlds, like being able to take a skin for a gun in Counter-Strike and carry it over to Fortnite. To be honest, the idea that games publishers would agree to the free-sharing of their intellectual property, with all the lost profits that would entail, is the most unbelievable idea in the document.

But even Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney is open to the idea of some cross-communication in some form or another. This July, Sweeney told The New York Times that said a “tunnel” could exist between, in this example, the virtual worlds of Roblox and Fortnite. What’s not clear, however, is what a user could take from one end of that tunnel to the other beyond their own, custom-designed avatar.

Voica says that this cross-sharing of IP will be vital to ensuring the success of the metaverse. He used the example of a user buying a designer jacket, as a digital item which could be worn by their avatar as they went about their day. That item doesn’t have any value if you’re only able to wear it in the specific designer’s own virtual world. “It would be like buying a Manchester United shirt and only being able to wear it inside Manchester United’s stadium,” he said. And he believes that consumers wouldn’t buy into a system with such a limitation, saying that “people don’t want to be locked in.”

There’s also a line of thinking that a metaverse will actually describe the unification of the digital and real worlds. AR glasses that overlay a rich data set onto the street as you go about your day, outsourcing tasks from your own brain. That will, naturally, require smart glasses with transparent displays capable of actually reproducing this data in a useful manner. Not to mention a quantum leap in computer vision, data processing and battery life to make it viable for whole-day use. This, of course, will also require a dramatic shift in how we view privacy in public and private spaces a decade on from the privacy objections raised when Google Glass was briefly en vogue.

This September, The Washington Post interviewed Sima Sistani, the co-founder of Houseparty who now works for Epic Games. They said that the metaverse would be the thing that replaces Social Media to suck away all of our free time. Sistani believes that, unlike now, where people simply create images and post status updates, the next generation will enjoy collaborative experiences with one another. And that the next generation of content creators will create fresh experiences for the rest of us to enjoy, once we’ve paid for them.

One of the things that is kinda/sorta clear, at least from the metaverse’s boosters, is that the platform won’t be owned by a single person or company. Instead, it will — hopefully — operate much like the internet does now, with multiple providers offering infrastructure to build a cohesive whole. Or at least, that’s the theory, and there’s the additional hope that decentralized technologies will help reduce the potential for a single arbiter to rule over this new frontier.

Projects like Decentraland, its own virtual environment, are already working on this principle, with its economy running on Ethereum’s blockchain. As The New York Times reported earlier this year, Decentraland’s market has already seen real-world brokers buying up parcels of virtual real estate. And there are already art shows and casinos in operation inside Decentraland, all of which can be tied to some form of digital commerce. This is sadly at-odds with the potential for a post-scarcity digital utopia that a metaverse could theoretically foster.

Pop-culture descriptions of metaverses commonly present them less as a social good and more as a symptom of impending collapse. Even the reference onanism that is Ready Player One shows a world that has slid into economic, social and environmental decline. When asked about the metaverse, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel cited Snow Crash’s “virtual world created by an evil monopolist.” Not long after, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey agreed that Neal Stephenson’s novel was intended as a warning, rather than a guide. [An aside, in Snow Crash, poor users accessing the metaverse through a public terminal are rendered in monochrome, and are derided by the wider society as a consequence — something that was replicated in the real-world by Fortnite players who bullied “Default” players who didn’t buy custom skins for their avatars.]

Now, Meta believes enough in the metaverse that it’s hoisted its flag, and fortune, to the idea for the next few years. And it’s hard to think that, however convenient, its metaversal ambitions are a smokescreen for the very real issues the platform is currently facing. Titles like Roblox and Fortnite provide a vague sense of how a persistent, universal online world could hold the attention of users for thousands of hours, but those are for now curated experiences. And projects like Decentraland offer a hint as to how a virtual economy would function, but nothing yet gives us a cohesive grand narrative of the metaverse which can show us where it’s going. In many ways, companies like Meta are trying to put together this jigsaw without much of an idea of what it’s going to look like when it’s finished.

While Facebook the social network is still Facebook, the overarching company that it created is now called Meta. Facebook Inc. is changing its name in order to distinguish its myriad parts from the social network, which has an increasingly poor reputation pretty much everywhere. Particularly in the last few weeks.

While the company hopes it’ll offer some degree of distraction from current sentiment (and political focus), it’s not going to stop people talking about Facebook Meta.

Mark Zuckerberg announced the new name during his keynote for the company’s Connect event. He said: "From now on, we're going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook first."

The change appears very similar to how Google, the search and tech part, was bundled inside Alphabet — a bigger company to contain all the other parts.

The timing is, perhaps, even odder. The Facebook Papers — internal documents detailing the social network’s major failings and issues — encompassing misinformation, hate speech and censorship, are now public knowledge. Is this a distraction or Facebook wilfully forcing its own transformation at a time when most of us are more interested in how it’s going to fix its current state.

If I don’t want to use Facebook — why would I want to use its take on VR and the metaverse?

-Mat Smith

Meta is retiring the Oculus brand

Facebook Portal will also be known as Meta Portal moving forward.

Following the above announcement, a Facebook post from incoming CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth revealed that Meta is retiring the Oculus brand. Beginning in early 2022, the Oculus Quest will instead be known as the Meta Quest. Similarly, the Oculus App will be called Meta Quest App. According to Bosworth, the intention is "to make clear" to consumers Quest is a Meta product. "We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make," Bosworth said. The name is trickling down to other physical products. Facebook Portal will also become Meta Portal.

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Teenage Engineering made a mini ITX PC case called Computer–1

The $195 chassis is already sold out.

Teenage Engineering

Teenage Engineering is best known for its synths, but it likes to explore other avenues, from designing wireless buds to games consoles and even an IKEA collaboration. It has announced an ITX PC case it’s calling the Computer-1. The company says it has been working on the design since 2014. “It’s not a ground-breaking PC case, but we like it, and use it every day,” TE says on its website. Alas, iIt’s currently sold out, but you can sign up to get a notification once it is available — which is what I just did.

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Mac revenue hit an all-time high last quarter, even without new MacBook Pros

The iPhone remains the money-maker though.

The company just reported its results for the quarter ending on September 30th, and Apple made 29 percent more revenue than a year ago — that's $83.4 billion, for those keeping track. While iPhone sales made up almost 47 percent of Apple's total revenue. While Mac revenue was only up two percent, that was just enough for Apple to say it was a new all-time high for the Mac.

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Sony has now sold 13.4 million PS5s

A boost in third-party games helped offset a drop in first-party sales.

Sony's PlayStation 5 sales remain relatively steady and strong, despite widespread supply shortages, with 3.3 million units sold in fiscal Q2 compared to 2.2 million last quarter. That brought total sales up to 13.4 million units, Sony announced. Game sales were also up significantly at 76.4 million units compared to 63.6 million in the previous quarter. The company has already stated that it has enough components for 22.6 million units to be sold by March 2022. That would be enough to meet its sales projections, but if sales really explode during the holidays, that could mean shortages could continue.

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Meta’s first leaked product is a watch with a notch

The company is reportedly working on three generations of smartwatches.

Meta

Bloomberg has published an image showing a Facebook/Meta smartwatch with rounded corners. It also has a notch with a front-facing camera. App developer Steve Moser found the image inside the company's app used to control its Ray-Ban Stories AR sunglasses, hinting that it could also be used to control the watch in the future.

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