Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook, is racing to build the "metaverse," and Frances Haugen is worried. The company's notorious struggles to moderate content on its social media platform bode ill for Meta's ability to control what is posted in the virtual world, said Haugen, the former Facebook product manager who told lawmakers in October that Facebook prioritizes profit over user safety and programs its algorithms to promote divisive content.
"It's the exact same problems you're going to see in VR," Haugen said in an interview with CBS News, adding, "Facebook hasn't actually designed safety by design into it from the start."
Haugen said platforms like TikTok, where a small portion of the content generate most of the views, are easier to moderate compared to Facebook's more distributed model. In the virtual spaces where Meta is betting big, moderating content, removing disinformation and tracking violators will be a challenge because the interactions are not recorded.
"You don't know who's the person who said the horrible comment to you," Haugen said, while noting that there are technological solutions that could protect people in the metaverse, such as logging activity.
"You could be keeping the last 20 minutes all the time and for audio at least, it's not that much," she said. "But it shows that they don't have safety by design because that's an easy feature to have."
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