The metachallenges of the “metaverse”. by Brookings

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.