Days before Elon Musk’s deal to acquire Twitter could finally close, workers at the social company are warning that staff cuts would be “reckless.” Timereports that an open letter from an unspecified number of Twitter employees, directed to Musk and Tw…
The bizarre saga of Meta, The Wire and their fight over Indian content moderation
When a journalist at The Wire, an independent Indian publication, published a story on October 6th about a meme page’s claim that their Instagram post had been wrongfully removed, it hardly seemed like the kind of story that would draw much attention. …
Warehouse workers in Atlanta accuse Amazon of unfair labor practices
Amazon workers in Georgia are the latest to go public with complaints about the retail giant’s labor practices. Workers at an Atlanta warehouse joined with United For Respect, at a press conference near the company’s ATL6 warehouse to detail new unfair…
Nikola founder Trevor Milton convicted on three charges of fraud
Trevor Milton, the founder and former executive chairman of Nikola, has been found guilty on three counts of fraud for misleading the electric vehicle company’s investors about its business and technology.
In total, he was found guilty on one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. He was acquitted on one charge of securities fraud. His sentencing has been scheduled for January 27th. He faces up to 20 years in prison.
Milton was indicted by a federal grand jury on the charges last year, with prosecutors citing numerous alleged lies, including many made on Twitter, in podcast interviews and other media appearances. Prosecutors alleged he had lied about “nearly all aspects of the business” in an effort to boost the stock of the EV maker.
The SEC began investigating the company in 2020, after Hindenburg Research publicly accused Nikola of staging an “elaborate ruse” to mislead the public about the status of its electric semi, Nikola One. While the company had published a video purporting to show the truck “cruising on a road at a high rate of speed,” Hindenburg said the truck had actually been “towed to the top of a hill on a remote stretch of road and simply filmed it rolling down the hill.” The company ultimately paid $125 million to settle civil charges with the SEC in 2021.
During the trial, Milton’s defense lawyer argued that the video was merely “special effects” and that “it’s certainly not a crime to use special effects.” But prosecutors raised several other false claims by Milton, who was extremely active on Twitter. According to The Times, prosecutors said Milton also lied about having “binding contracts with trucking companies” that in reality were cancelable reservations for vehicles. Prosecutors also cited Milton’s claims about making “green hydrogen” when the company had not yet produced any.
Elizabeth Warren presses Texas on crypto miners’ energy use
Elizabeth Warren and six other Democratic senators are pressing Texas’ energy regulator on whether the crypto mining industry is putting additional strain on the state’s grid, and its impact on climate change.In a letter to the Electric Reliability Cou…
Google lets Donald Trump’s Truth Social into Play Store
The Donald Trump-backed Truth Social is live in Google’s Play Store following a months-long delay due to concerns over its content moderation policies. The two sides had been going back and forth about the app’s approval since late August, according to…
Alex Jones ordered to pay $965 million after misinformation campaign targeting Sandy Hook families
After nearly a decade of peddling baseless conspiracy theories and outright lies about the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a Connecticut jury has awarded nearly a billion dollars in damages to families of the victims and an FBI agent whose lives were further upended by Jones’ claims the shooting was a hoax. Jones, who was deplatformed from most major social media and podcast platforms years ago, said on his show he would appeal the ruling.
Jurors in the weeks-long trial were tasked with deciding how much the Inforwars host should pay in damages to 15 plaintiffs after previously being found guilty of defamation. According to CNN, prosecutors had sought at least $500 million in damages to represent “the more than 550 million online impressions Jones’ Sandy Hook lie allegedly received online.” Jurors ultimately awarded $965 million, an amount that doesn’t include punitive damages.
Though Jone and several accounts and pages associated with him have been banned from Facebook, YouTube and other platforms for years, his reach on social media prior to those bans was raised in court. At one point during the trial, prosecutors displayed Jones’ Facebook engagement in 2016, indicating he had more than 4.1 billion impressions on the platform at the time.
This is Infowars’ Facebook engagement from 2016, shown in court. It’s, uh, staggering. pic.twitter.com/B0HkkcebyU
— Anna Merlan (@annamerlan) September 14, 2022
Jones and InfoWars were kicked off Facebook and Instagram for good in 2019, following earlier bans from Spotify and Apple’s podcast platforms. Though his deplatforming made him less relevant on mainstream social media, Infowars actually made more money after the ban, according to evidence raised in the trial. A forensic economist testified Jones’ net worth could be as high as $270 million.
Just how much money Jones’ victims will actually receive is another matter. In addition to an expected appeal, Jones has also been accused of using shell companies and other techniques to shield his wealth from lawsuits.
James Webb Telescope captures unique dust rings surrounding two stars
The James Webb Telescope has captured an unusual dust pattern around two stars that can track the passage of time similar to ring patterns on the inside of tree trunks. The image, detailed by the European Space Agency and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laborato…
Meta will integrate Zoom and Microsoft Teams into its VR workspaces
Meta is making a big push to sell its new Quest Pro to office workers. At Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg showed off upcoming integrations with Zoom and Microsoft teams, along with a slew of other features meant to make the headset more appealing to businesses.
The updates are the clearest sign yet that Meta is keen to position the $1500 Quest Pro as a business and productivity tool, and that it sees offices as a key part of its vision for the metaverse. And Horizon Workrooms, the VR meeting software launched in beta last year, is central to that pitch.
Among the updates: new integrations with Zoom and Microsoft Teams so people can call into meetings happening in VR. With the change, people will be able to join colleagues meeting in VR Horizon Workrooms from their non-VR devices. In a blog post, Meta said the Zoom integration, expected “early in 2023” will give “more options on how you choose to show up.”
Likewise, the integration with Microsoft’s Teams will enable participants to join more “immersive” meetings in Teams from Horizon Workrooms. The company hasn’t said when the tie-in with Teams could be available, but the feature is part of a broader partnership with Microsoft to bring its productivity apps to Quest.
Meta
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined Zuckerberg to announce that the company was also working Windows 365 for the Quest Pro and Quest 2, and that content from Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook would be viewable from the headsets. Meta’s newly improved avatars will also be available in Teams.
Meta also showed off improvements to existing Workrooms features, like the ability to add sticky notes to VR whiteboards, and the ability to collaboratively view 3D models. The company is also riffing on a popular Zoom feature with the ability to form smaller breakout groups within larger meetings. And for solo office tasks, workers will be able to work from up to three virtual screens in Workrooms and add up to four customizable “personal environments.”
Meta
Zuckerberg also teased a new feature called “magic rooms” that will allow teams to work together in mixed reality, rather than solely in VR workspaces. He said the feature will be suited to hybrid teams, where there are people working remotely with groups of people who are in the same physical space. “Everyone is present and has the same tools, whether they’re in full VR or in mixed reality,” he explained. Ina. blog post, Meta said magic rooms are currently being tested internally, and could launch more widely sometime in 2023.
Also coming in 2023 will be a new “Quest for Business” subscription bundle that comes with device management controls and security features so businesses’ can manage Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets the way they would with company-issued laptops or mobile phones. The bundle will also include access to “premium support” features.
Questions Meta needs to answer about the metaverse at Connect
Just under a year ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company he founded as a Harvard undergrad would change its name to Meta. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first,” he said during a virtual keynote at the company’s Connect event.
Zuckerberg has spent the year since hyping all things metaverse. He’s shown off dystopian VR offices, looked at pictures of space in VR with Neil deGrasse Tyson and persuaded morethan one professional athlete to play VR games with him. He went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to extol the virtues of mixed martial arts and virtual reality. Rogan even got an early demo of Meta’s new high-end VR headset, which is expected to launch during Connect.
But the metaverse has also proved to be a massive money pit. In the last year alone, the company has lost billions of dollars on its metaverse ambitions, and the trend is unlikely to reverse any time soon. The company, which last year announced plans to hire 10,000 workers in Europe solely to build its metaverse, is now cutting staff and reorganizing teams.
So at this year’s Connect, which kicks off at 10 AM PT tomorrow with a keynote from Zuckerberg, the stakes feel even higher. And we still have a lot of questions about what it really means to be a “metaverse company.”
Can Zuckerberg explain what the metaverse even is (again)?
It’s perhaps the most obvious issue, but in the nearly a year since Zuckerberg first attempted to articulate what a metaverse is, it’s still not very clear. Last year, Zuckerberg described it as “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.” The company’s website currently says the metaverse is “the next evolution in social connection and the successor to the mobile internet.”
But what those words mean to most people is fuzzy at best. “Outside of early adopters and tech-savvy people, there’s still confusion as to what is the metaverse and what we’re going to be doing with it,” says Carolina Milanesi, a consumer analyst with Creative Strategies.
That means Zuckerberg will not only need to offer an understandable definition, but an idea of what it will mean for the billions of people already on his platform. Which brings us to…
Can it ever look cool?
Meta
This may not seem like the most important problem facing Zuckerberg’s vision for a mobile internet-replacing metaverse, but it’s one that could go a long way toward building the hype he so desperately craves. Because, right now, Meta’s metaverse looks… kind of crappy.
This was never more apparent than when Zuckerberg very earnestly shared a capture from Horizon Worlds of his avatar in front of a VR Eiffel Tower and Sagrada Familia that could generously be described as flat and amateurish. He quickly followed up with a new avatar, and promised better graphics for Horizon Worlds would be coming at Connect.
But Meta will need to show more than just graphics that look like they were created this millennium. Ideally, it would show a metaverse experience that actually looks cool. Or at least one that could appeal to people already spending time in Roblox or Fortnite or other metaverse-adjacent spaces.
Milanesi adds that it would help to show off metaverse experiences that go beyond just having meetings or hanging out with strangers in VR. “I think there are other use cases either on the education side or on the entertainment side, that might be a bit more interesting,” she says.
However, early signs suggest we shouldn’t expect drastic improvements to Horizon Worlds. According to a recent report from The Verge, the app is so buggy that the company is struggling to get its own employees to use it consistently.
How will it get creators and third-parties on board?
But that brings up another issue: for all of Zuckerberg’s talk about interoperability and making the metaverse an open ecosystem, Meta has so far shown little progress when it comes to bringing outside developers or other companies into its vision in a meaningful way.
They’ve also already alienated many creators and would-be early adopters with a 48-percent commission on sales of virtual items in Horizon Worlds. For a company that has made Apple’s “App Store Tax” a central talking point, and has made investing in creators one of its top priorities, it’s no surprise that a high take feels like a slap in the face to creators.
Meta
How will it handle harassment, misinformation and other harms?
Considering Meta’s track record on unintended harms, the company has said surprisingly little about how it plans to address these issues in the metaverse. The company has given cursory nods to trust and safety in the Metaverse — Meta policy chief Nick Clegg has talked about defining standards for the metaverse — but so far the company seems to be borrowing from the same playbook it’s always used.
Already, this is more than a theoretical problem. Meta added a “Personal Boundary” feature in February, billing it as a way for people to protect their personal space while in VR. But that update only came after reports of groping in the metaverse had already gone viral. While that update may address one form of harassment, others have noted it could also encourage other disturbing behaviors, like encircling users in an effort to virtually “gang up” on them.
It also shows that Meta is still largely reactive when it comes to safety issues: spinning up new features and quick fixes in response to a bad news cycle rather than launching with them already in place.
What about AR and non-headset enabled experiences?
We’re expecting Zuckerberg to talk a lot about virtual reality — the company is launching its newest headseat at Connect — but it’s a lot less clear how augmented reality fits into the company’s current plans. Meta has teased AR glasses, but those are likely at least two years away.
And without glasses, much of Meta’s work on AR is limited to in-app effects for Instagram and Facebook, which are popular but definitely not part of any kind of metaverse. And it’s still not at all clear that Meta has a plan for integrating its existing social platforms into the metaverse. In a recent interview with Protocol, Zuckerberg suggested the company was thinking about it, but stopped short of giving any kind of idea as to how this may work.
“For Horizon, making it so that you can create a world and share it on Facebook or Instagram, and people can just jump into it from there — that’s going to be pretty valuable,” he said. But, he added, “we need to be careful about not making it primarily a mobile experience.” The reason, he said, is because he wants the metaverse to be about new platforms and technologies, not simply an extension of the mobile products that already exist. But the fact is the market for VR headsets is still tiny compared with the number of people who use Facebook and Instagram.
And if he wants more of them onboard, they should be able to experience the metaverse in some form with the devices they already own.