Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told listeners to his July 2021
quarterly earnings call that “I expect people will transition from seeing us as a
social-media company to seeing us as a metaverse company.” A few weeks
later, the business plan had morphed into a political plan and the Washington Post
headlined, “How Facebook’s ‘metaverse’ became a political strategy in Washington.”
“[T]he metaverse is already a full-on political push,” the article explained, with the goal
to position the company “far from the controversies of social media”, such as privacy,
antitrust, content moderation, and political extremism.