No matter who ends up in the seats when the music stops, the task they will inherit is existential. Thirty years ago, Europe represented roughly a quarter of global GDP. Now we’ve fallen behind. GDP per capita in the EU is half of that in the US, at approximately $40,000 per European compared to $80,000 per American. None of the world’s top 10 companies are European. None of the dozen most valuable unicorns — startups valued at $1 billion or more — are European. Of the Top 50 companies in Europe none of them were founded within the last 30 years.

Our companies are growing more slowly, reporting lower returns and lagging behind their peers in research and development, even in industries that were traditionally Europe’s strength like automotive and manufacturing. Just one of the top ten electric vehicle brands in the US last year was European. There are four times more semiconductor plants planned in China than in Europe.

The sad fact is the EU is no longer a fertile ground for innovation and world-class companies. As Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz have stated starkly: “Our Europe is mortal”. In their words, Europe is experiencing its “Zeitenwende” — an historic turning point. But which way it turns remains to be seen.

The era of generative AI presents an opportunity to change the story. These powerful technologies could provide a massive boost when we need it most. Goldman Sachs estimates that generative AI could increase global GDP by seven per cent over the next decade.

Europe is a pioneer of tech regulation — as GDPR, the DMA, DSA and AI Act demonstrate — but not yet at pioneering and deploying the tech at scale itself. Europe’s regulatory complexity and the patchwork of laws across different member states often makes companies hesitant to roll out new products here. Meta, Google and others have delayed rolling out their AI assistants here, and even European success stories like Volkswagen are increasingly leaving to build and launch their AI products in the US. With the rapid adoption of AI in the US and China, the gap between these superpowers and the EU is widening.

How can Europe change its course? The underlying infrastructure for foundational AI models is hugely expensive and energy-intensive. But deploying and customising AI models, especially open source ones, will give European businesses, start-ups and researchers access to tools they wouldn’t otherwise be able to develop on their own. With Europe’s high quality university sector producing top talent, and our deep capacity for research and development, we could become a world leader in the application layer of AI — creating the apps and services through which people experience this powerful new technology.

Europe isn’t playing to its biggest strength — its single market of 450 million consumers. European leaders have stated repeatedly that one of their main goals is for Europe to compete with the US and China in tech. They long for the next Silicon Valley to emerge on European soil. I share that ambition. As a proud European, I would love to see the next Meta, Alibaba or Google emerge on the continent. And we have all the necessary ingredients: a vast consumer market, great universities, top talent, and a history of experimentation and innovation.

But for all the regulatory activism — a staggering 77 new pieces of EU digital legislation have been adopted since 2019 — we have been held back by our failure to properly complete the digital single market. It is striking, for instance, that a digital startup in Amsterdam would still have to navigate 27 different intellectual property laws, various rules for the licensing of content, data protection authorities and other obstacles before it could go live across the continent.

During my years in Brussels as a young man in the 1990s, the single market was cause for huge optimism. I studied at the College of Europe — where I met my wife Miriam — and became an official in the Commission during the heyday of globalisation and European integration. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Single European Act was bedding in, the Maastricht Treaty was hot off the presses and the WTO was up and running. I was then an MEP in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when it felt like the world was growing closer together and the EU — this remarkable experiment in cooperation, openness and strength in numbers — was the symbol of that optimism.

That feels like a long time ago now. The 2008 financial crisis broke the back of globalisation. A cloud of introspection fell over Europe as governments, loaded with huge deficits and enraptured by anti-establishment populists on the left and right, prioritised issues of national sovereignty over shared endeavour. No country turned its back on the European project more emphatically than my own country, the United Kingdom. The architects of the single market — not least its British mastermind Lord Cockfield — would be spinning in their graves if they saw how it just isn’t delivering the prosperity Europeans need today. Instead, the EU is increasingly disputatious and fragmented, with regulators and policymakers pulling in different directions. It’s little wonder so many voters, especially young people, are supporting insurgent populists promising to shake up the status quo.

I believe we can get that optimism back. Our new Parliamentarians and Commissioners face a huge task to reverse Europe’s economic decline. It won’t be easy but it is possible. We just need to play to our strengths. The single market is Europe’s biggest asset but it isn’t complete. Finish the job. Avoid fragmented regulation. Embrace an open approach to AI development. Then let European creativity, ingenuity and entrepreneurialism bring back the optimism we all crave.

You’re in the air traffic control room overlooking the runways of O’Hare International Airport in Chicago the morning after a heavy storm caused a number of flights to be rescheduled. Now the storm has passed, the pilots are itching to take off and the departure gates are chock-a-block. A pilot asks you to open Gate 1, so you do. Then another wants Gate 5 opened. Within seconds a request for Gate 3, then Gate 2, then Gate 4, then another pilot at Gate 1. As you open the gates one by one, the planes taxi and prepare for takeoff, but the taxiways are getting crowded. Just as one jumbo jet begins to zoom along the far runway, the plane you just let out of Gate 2 crosses its path and —

CRASH!

The stern-faced instructor isn’t happy. But this isn’t the real O’Hare airport. It’s an algebra lesson in Virtual Reality and you’ll soon be plotting flight paths on x and y axes and using equations to figure out potential collision points. Then it’s off to south Florida to work out the probability of being hit by a hurricane by creating a simulator based on historic humidity and temperature data. Or to a rice field to mix chemicals for pesticide to keep the crops from being destroyed. And afterwards, you can join a virtual space with your teacher and other students to practice and apply what you’ve learned. It certainly beats the math lessons at my old school (or maths lessons as we called them, since the school was in England).

These examples are real lessons created by a company called Prisms VR that are being used in classes in 130+ school systems across 30 states in the US, as well as schools in Romania, Singapore and China. But they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Metaverse technologies like virtual and augmented reality have the potential to revolutionize education and training, bringing teachers and students together in new ways, introducing interactive elements to classes that can help students retain what they learn, making experiences accessible that would otherwise have been out of reach to many due to income or geography, and taking the risk out of otherwise dangerous or expensive training.

Digital technologies have transformed so many areas of education over the last two decades or so. I’m only in my 50s but when I went to school the most technologically advanced thing in class was a pocket calculator. Now iPads and other tablets are commonplace. Museums and galleries the world over have integrated touch screens and other interactive elements to their exhibits. Apps like Duolingo have brought language learning to smartphones. The fact these things have become normalized so quickly is a testament to the rapid way we have all seamlessly integrated new technologies into our lives.

But there are limits to two-dimensional technologies. While the shift to video-conferencing and other remote learning tools kept the wheels of education turning during the pandemic — something that would have been impossible just a few years earlier — anyone with teenage kids can attest to the fact that it was often a frustrating experience. It was hard to keep them engaged for lengthy periods interacting with thumbnail images of teachers and classmates on a flat screen. They lacked that vital sense of presence — being with their classmates and teachers, interacting in a shared space.

The metaverse is the next evolution of the internet — and it is exactly this sense of presence that sets it apart. It spans a range of technologies, including virtual reality (VR) headsets that transport you to whole new environments, immersing you in virtual spaces where you and others interact as avatars; augmented reality (AR) glasses that will one day project computer-generated images onto the world around you; and mixed reality (MR) experiences that blend both physical and virtual environments. These technologies create a more immersive, 3D experience where you feel like you are right there with another person or in another place.

Technologies that create a sense of presence and shared space offer new ways for educators to engage and interact with their students. This isn’t about making teachers the servants of new technologies. Quite the opposite. It’s about giving teachers more ways to do what they do best — teach. Getting the tech into the hands of teachers and trainers so they can shape how they’re used will be the key to unlocking this potential.

For most of us, learning is social — we learn from and with others, and from each other’s experiences. It’s about interaction and discussion as much as it is about absorbing facts. That’s why this unique feeling of presence and immersion these technologies create are so fundamental.

While the technology is new, and the research base is still emerging, the early evidence is really promising. Academic studies have found that VR can positively improve a variety of learning outcomes — such as comprehension, knowledge retention, student engagement, attention span and motivation. I think that’s something we all intuitively understand. It is so much easier to remember doing something than being told something. According to a 2021 study by PwC, 40% of VR learners are more confident in applying what they’ve been taught and 150% more engaged during classes. Similarly, a recent survey by XR Association (XRA) and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) found 77% of educators believe these technologies ignite curiosity and improve engagement in class.

That’s what makes the possibilities for learning in the metaverse so exciting. Instead of telling students what the dinosaurs were like, they can walk among them. Entire science laboratories can be built and filled with kit that most schools would never be able to afford. Students from disadvantaged towns can go on field trips to the world’s best museums. This isn’t science fiction or wishful thinking — it is happening right now.

One example that came up at a roundtable event I chaired with educators, academics and others in London last month is a school that has built a digital version of the Globe Theater — the circular Elizabethan theater where Shakespeare’s plays were performed — and is putting on their end of term show on its famous stage, completely virtually. Young people won’t be in the same physical space as their classmates, and they won’t be traveling to London, but they will still be able to collaborate and learn how Shakespeare’s plays were created for this unique space.

The combination of immersive technologies with powerful advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) creates opportunities for education experiences that are much more tailored to the needs of individual students. Too often, education systems are built to be one size fits all. Using AI, a teacher with little coding experience could design a virtual environment to deliver a specific lesson. It will become possible to quickly and easily personalize curriculum materials to the learning needs of individual students. And because AI can process and translate multiple languages simultaneously, it can be a powerful tool for language learning in particular, especially when combined with immersive technologies. A language student could, for example, sit in a virtual Paris café, converse with the waiter and receive real time feedback on their pronunciation.

The four main ways the metaverse is transforming education and training

Re-imagining school lessons

In his book Experience on Demand, Jeremy Bailenson, a leading researcher in the field of VR, coined the acronym DICE, suggesting that the kind of experiences that should be designed for VR are those that would be Dangerous, Impossible, Counterproductive or Expensive in real life. By allowing students to drive a train, monitor a disease outbreak, or even crash jumbo jets on virtual runways, immersive algebra lessons can show how to apply theoretical skills in real life.

There’s great potential here for the teaching of languages. Every linguist knows it’s easier to remember how to order a cup of coffee in another country when you’ve actually done it, rather than reading words and phrases in books or endlessly reciting them in a classroom. In VR, we can immerse language students in a city abroad. A recent study comparing the use of VR and videos in teaching English as a foreign language found that the VR group outperformed the video watchers on both listening comprehension and retention. Meanwhile, AR apps that are already available on the smartphones many of us carry in our pockets are bringing museum exhibits to life, or making the pages of an anatomy textbook pop out in front of us.

These technologies can free teachers from the constraints of the classroom and make lessons so much more vivid and interactive for their students. They can teach marine biology on the ocean floor, or deliver their philosophy lecture in an amphitheater in ancient Rome. A pioneering Danish company, Labster, has built virtual science labs that allow students to use the equivalent of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment that no school could ever afford. And they can use it to conduct experiments that would be far too dangerous in real life. After all, in VR you can blow things up or spill acid everywhere without consequences.

Bringing teachers and students together in shared virtual spaces

In the metaverse, we will be able to bring different classes, students, and teachers together regardless of geography in a way that feels much more real than a Zoom meeting. At Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, biomolecular chemist Dr Muhsinah Morris teaches her students in a virtual lab — a digital twin of the real chemistry lab at the physical university. In the virtual lab, students can conduct experiments just as they would if they were there in person.

Morehouse is one of 10 ‘metaversity’ digital twin campuses in the United States — with a further 16 on the way — created through a partnership between Meta and VictoryXR to create replicas of existing campuses constructed in fully spatial 3D. In these virtual campuses, students can move about, socialize, learn and compete in activities, and take part in classes they can access remotely. These campuses are accessible to students who can’t attend in person — they might have caring responsibilities, or not be able to afford the travel — and they’re reporting impressive results. Morehouse found that students who learned in VR had an average final test score of 85, versus 78 in person and 81 for traditional online methods. They also reported an uplift in student attendance and engagement.

And this isn’t just happening in Higher Education or in North America. Countries like Japan and South Korea are pioneering the use of immersive technologies in education. At Japan’s N and S high schools, the largest online high schools in the country, more than 6,000 students learn in VR using Meta Quest 2 headsets. Their teachers report that this enhances the learning experience and enables students to nurture social skills even when they are physically far away.

Enhancing vocational training and removing risk

How do you train a vet to dissect animals without the need for actual animals? At Georgian College in Canada they use a VR program, also developed by VictoryXR, and in a separate program Veterinary Technician students learn about bovine and canine anatomy using an open source application that was developed by Virginia Tech University. These virtual settings give the students real hands-on experience without the need for live animals — or dead ones.

The metaverse can make vocational training like this much more accessible and affordable. In the metaverse, we can simulate the situations people will experience in the workplace — particularly those where it might be challenging or potentially dangerous to get real world experience. Plumbers can train on virtual pipes; firefighters can escape virtual buildings; nurses can train on virtual patients. Elsewhere at Georgian College, paramedics practice resuscitation on virtual patients, future architects use it to stand inside the spaces they design, and Maritime Ship Navigation students go on the virtual bridge of an oil tanker to navigate in and out of simulated ports around the globe. The College specifically embraced VR for a form of training that would otherwise be extremely expensive and dangerous in the real world.

Again, the early evidence suggests that immersive technologies can be extremely effective for teaching procedural tasks requiring a high degree of visualization and experiential understanding. A study comparing the outcomes of medical students learning how to respond to an emergency fire in a theatre found that 70% of the students who trained in VR were able to perform the correct procedure in the correct order — 50% higher than the control group who were exposed to a presentation and reading material instead. In Australia, St John Ambulance has worked with developer Start Beyond to use VR to transport first aid students into realistic situations where they can apply their skills with confidence, with 9 out of 10 students feeling prepared upon completion.

It’s easy to see how the benefits of learning in VR could be particularly concentrated in science, technology and math (STEM) subjects, which are a key part of government economic growth agendas the world over.

New opportunities for lifelong learning

One of the most common misunderstandings around the metaverse, often made by people who don’t use these technologies at the moment, is that it is all just about playing video games. But that’s missing the point entirely. While gaming has been a big part of the evolution of these technologies thus far, the people using them right now consider it to be just one part of the experience. It’s clear that many Meta Quest users already see education as one of the main motivations for owning their device, alongside health and wellbeing, work, socializing and more.

A host of apps already bring learning into people’s homes. While those created by Jurassic Park Studios or National Geographic are fun to use, they also introduce people to new subjects and fire up enthusiasm to learn more. Apps like the Anne Frank House or Travelling While Black help people experience history, or even the present day, from someone else’s point of view. Through The March 360 experience, they could even feel what it is like to march with more than a quarter of a million people and witness Dr Martin Luther King deliver his famous I Have a Dream speech.

In the UK, a company called Bodyswaps is building full courses in these soft skills — things like interview training, public speaking, and building trust in the workplace. These skills have traditionally been hard to teach because they are fundamentally visual and three dimensional — if I attend a job interview the way I sit, use my hands, and make eye contact can be just as important as the words I say. More than 100 higher education institutions have already signed up to Bodyswaps and will be teaching soft skills in the metaverse this year — but there is certain to be crossover demand for people to use these types of app at home too.

The metaverse can help level the playing field

Perhaps most excitingly, the metaverse could help solve one of the most stubborn problems in education — equity. Children from poorer backgrounds falling behind, and staying behind, their wealthier peers is a complex problem that I was confronted with repeatedly in my time in Government in the UK. I introduced a number of policy changes to try and address this — like introducing universal free school meals for children in the first three year groups and creating a “Pupil Premium” to give extra funding to schools based on the number of children they had from poorer households. After leaving government, I chaired the Commission on Inequality in Education for the Social Market Foundation think tank, which found that the performance gap between the richest and the poorest in the UK has remained persistently large between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s, with no significant improvement in that time. As our report said:

how much money a child’s parents earn, which region they live in and their ethnicity are all very significant factors in how successful they are at school. Where someone comes from can still matter much more in determining where they end up in life than their talents or efforts.

This educational divide is by no means unique to the UK, as demonstrated by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, which reports a pattern of poorer pupils lagging behind their wealthier peers around the world.

While much more research is needed to understand how the benefits of education in the metaverse will support all pupils, it’s not hard to imagine the benefits of being freed from the limitations of time and geography. Metaverse technologies create the possibility of approaching geographic educational disparities in new ways. Colleges in disadvantaged areas will be able to collaborate and get support from those hundreds of miles away. An outstanding teacher could teach in an underserved school 100 miles away. A school system that has a shortage of teachers in a particular subject — a real problem in some parts of the United States — could recruit them to teach classes from anywhere in the country — and actually feel present.

It also opens up opportunities for ambitious students to learn from people they don’t have access to locally. A college student in Madrid could attend a seminar led by a Professor in Seoul. Students in the most remote corner of Alaska could tour NASA, the Louvre in Paris, or the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo. A personal tutor could run a session with a student in a completely different city without either having to leave their house.

Research has already shown that VR may be a compelling intervention for students challenged within the current education system. As far back as 2001, it has been considered a promising way of supporting the social learning of children who have autism spectrum disorder, with more recent studies finding that VR “improved emotion recognition, social attribution, and executive function”, and led to “a positive change in participant skills related to… interactions, use of eye contact, and initiation of interactions”. A combination of 3D interactions based on modern therapy techniques, emotional control and relaxation software, and simulation of various social situations, can improve the behavioral, communication and social skills of children. Teachers at Dublin’s Coláiste Pobail Setanta School — for children on the autism spectrum — use a VR platform developed by Floreo to help their students learn social, behavioral, communication and life skills by navigating simulated situations like going to a supermarket or visiting a safari park full of animals.

In many parts of the world, young people too rarely see people like them reflected in the things they are learning about. ​​Australia’s Indigital uses VR to help children connect with and learn from indigenous elders about cultural knowledge, history and language — all while learning digital skills like AR, animation, audio recording and coding. Georgian College has built a virtual house specifically for indigenous students to learn, with objects labelled in both Anishinaabemowin and English words. Every Thursday, students meet with their teacher in avatar form, occasionally joined by an elder from the Indigenous community for conversations and storytelling.

And while some people might assume that VR could put more, not less, distance between a learner and their subject, in fact in some important scenarios the opposite may be true. When the University of Maryland Global Campus surveyed students who had met with tutors and classmates in VR they found that, for some, being an avatar reduced their fear of speaking to faculty members and interacting with peers. Students with agoraphobia and PTSD both reported experiencing difficulty with in-person interaction, but were comfortable in the virtual classroom.

This phenomenon is backed up by research. Dr. Yukie Saito at Japan’s Chuo University studied the effects of VR on foreign language learning using Immerse and found that while participants in her studies felt hesitant speaking foreign languages in person, using an avatar lowers a psychological barrier and encourages them to express themselves without feeling self-conscious. The hope is that, when it comes to applying what they’ve learned in the real world, these students will bring the same confidence they felt in avatar form.

What happens next?

At the heart of all of this are educators. More technology isn’t an end goal in itself. Technology in the classroom is exciting because it can help teachers, not replace them. The point of these technologies is that they can bring people together in new ways, creating new opportunities for teachers to connect with and inspire students. As with all innovation, our starting point should be supporting brilliant educators to deliver the most impactful and accessible programs of learning.

While this work has important societal benefits, the education market also presents commercial value for companies like Meta, as well as those companies and developers building education products for our devices. The EdTech market is thriving and estimated to grow a further 16% by 2026. From the calculator to the Acorn computer, the electronic whiteboard to the iPad, immersive technologies are likely to take their place in a long line of technological innovations that have found their way into schools and universities.

There are exciting things happening right now in the education space, but we are still a long way from realizing the full potential of these technologies. Meta’s own headsets are not fully available in many markets, and there’s a lot of homework we and others have to do to make sure that the products we produce are classroom-ready. In the short term, the application of metaverse technologies in education is likely to be easier in higher education and workforce training, where users are adults and providers are better resourced and able to adapt quickly. While some schools are doing trailblazing work, this sector is likely to take longer to develop as we learn more about the best way to use these technologies with different age ranges.

To make the metaverse a reality, Meta can’t and won’t be doing this work alone. Like today’s internet, the metaverse will be a constellation of technologies, platforms, and products. When it comes to education and training, the apps and experiences that will find success will be built by others, and delivered by education professionals.

The Brookings Institution, which has produced valuable work on how to assess quality in education technology, highlights the importance of developers and technology companies communicating with the scientists who study how people actually learn.

That’s why Meta is supporting a detailed, global research program that is looking at how to maximize the benefits of these technologies while minimizing the risks. For example, in Europe, academic institutions, think-tanks and other experts in the UK, Italy, Spain, France, and Germany, will examine and pilot how immersive technologies can contribute to the future of education, improve existing learning experiences, boost youth employability, and contribute to professional and executive training. This research will be published for the whole sector to learn from.

But the tech companies themselves can only do so much. Once the technologies exist, it is ultimately governments and other institutions that will have to make sure they are utilized properly across public education systems. What we really need is for policymakers, academic institutions and educators to recognize the opportunities these technologies present and run with them. It is for governments to develop ways to utilize new technologies in the public sector, and to provide the investment to make it possible at scale. And it is forward-thinking education administrators who deploy these technologies creatively in their schools and colleges who are going to provide the best practice case studies for others to adopt.

Above all, it is skilled teachers who know best how to inspire their students. That makes widespread teacher training an essential component of any government strategy — none of it will work without teachers who understand how to get the best out of these products. Getting this kit into their hands is the necessary starting point.

Governments can also start laying the groundwork through curriculum development, digital literacy schemes, and by supporting and convening educators to help steer this technology in ways that can have the biggest impact. Crucially, it will be up to governments to help to ensure that all schools have access to these technologies, so that educational inequalities don’t get further entrenched simply because better resourced schools can get hold of hardware others can’t.

Some governments are already getting a head start. In India, where the Government has made digital skills a core part of its “techade” strategy, Digital Citizenship and AR-VR Skills have been introduced to the curriculum for children in grades 6–8 across 25,000 schools. More than 300,000 teachers and a million students in India have also been introduced to training in cyber safety, cyber security, digital citizenship, and immersive technologies.

A US company, Lighthaus, has developed a curriculum-aligned science app called Nano through a grant from the US National Institutes of Health, and is already reporting statistically significant gains in students’ interest in and enjoyment of science. The US Department of Education also ran the EdSim Challenge, a competition to identify and reward “immersive simulations that transfer academic, technical, and employability skills”. In Poland, the Ministry for Education is supporting a schools project by VRHeroes, which teaches students about the Warsaw Uprising. So far, 25,000 Polish students have learned about this important historical event through being immersed in it and 2,000 teachers have learned how VR can be used as an educational tool. Building on that project, Meta is now working with VR Heroes and the Research and Academic Computer Network (NASK), under the Prime Minister’s Chancellery, to create a training program for hundreds of teachers from across Poland, so they can learn how to use immersive technologies to teach students. It’s early days, but these first steps are laying the groundwork for Polish students to be among the first to learn subjects like math, history and geography in VR.

Of course, some of the predictions people make of how future technologies will impact society are fanciful or overly-optimistic. Indeed, much of what we at Meta believe will make the metaverse so revolutionary doesn’t exist yet. But that’s not the case when it comes to education and training.

These technologies are already being used to teach and learn.

The potential they have to transform education more broadly relies not so much on technological advances but on scale and access. The more developers build these programs, and the more governments, companies, schools, colleges and other institutions utilize them and invest in them, the more impact they will have. And as the technologies mature and develop, so will their ability to translate ideas across cultures, break down socio-economic barriers, and create more and better ways for teachers to bring subjects to life for their students.

When Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made his impassioned plea to the Russian people on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his country, he knew it wouldn’t reach them through Russia’s state-controlled TV news programs. But it might reach them through social media.

In early 2022, there were 80 million active Instagram accounts in Russia, and more than 20 million people accessing Facebook. Millions more used TikTok, Twitter and all manner of other free-to-use apps and services. At the same time, millions of Ukrainians were using social media to tell the world beyond their borders what was happening.

Within days, Russia was blocking or restricting access to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, attempting to cut Russian citizens off from the interconnected world of the open internet. TikTok restricted its own services in response to Russia’s newly imposed “fake news” law.

Social media helps ideas, news and experiences cross national and cultural borders. At the start of the war, nearly three-quarters of Facebook and Instagram users in Russia had at least one friend outside the country. More than 60% of Facebook users in Ukraine had a Facebook friend in Russia, and 90% had at least one friend in the rest of the world. This free flow of information — people sharing their experiences and opinions, and seeing events unfold from the point of views of those outside their borders — was the antithesis of Russia’s state-controlled propaganda machine.

The Russia-Ukraine war will have seismic repercussions for many years to come. It has united the European Union and the West — and rejuvenated the NATO military alliance — at a time when the demands of domestic politics seemed to be pulling in the opposite direction. But it has also exploded the idea that economic interdependence inevitably leads to peace and stability. It has cast further doubt about the onward march of globalization, after the huge repercussions of the 2008 financial crisis and many of the political shockwaves of the last decade. The threat now is of rapidly escalating “de-globalization,” protectionism and nationalism.

This is playing out in the digital sphere too. The rise of an authoritarian internet model — with citizens segregated from the rest of the global internet and subject to extensive surveillance — presents a real risk to the open, accessible internet as we know it. This is how the internet works in China, and other countries have made similar moves to build digital walls at their national boundaries. Russia was already moving in this direction before the internet clampdown that accompanied its invasion of Ukraine.

As lawmakers across the globe devise a much-needed new generation of internet regulations, a worrying strain of digital nationalism has crept into the debate. Talk of “digital sovereignty” and “data localization”— asserting a nation’s right to stop or limit the free flow of cross border data — is now commonplace. And these ideas increasingly underpin new laws. As they do, they chip away at the foundations of the open internet, which relies on the flow of data across borders.

And they do so on a false premise. Underpinning digital nationalism is a misunderstanding of what data is and how it creates value.

Public discourse about data often relies on mistaken assumptions and metaphors from the industrial era that shape the way the debate is framed. One of the most dangerous misconceptions about data — in policymaking terms, at least — is that data is the “new oil”: a scarce resource to be hoarded, enriching those who own the most. But data is not a finite commodity to be owned and traded, pumped from the ground and burned in cars and factories. It is something else entirely. And its ability to circulate and flow across borders is fundamental to how it creates value.

So what is data? And why is it so valuable?

Data isn’t oil

Data and information are not quite the same thing. Data can be ordered, systematically interrogated and used for purposes that previously wouldn’t have been possible. A history book about Medieval England will be chock full of fascinating information, but it often won’t be quantifiable data. On the other hand, the Domesday Book, which surveyed and valued landed property in late 11th century England, was the most comprehensive exercise in data collection of its era — even if it wasn’t a gripping page turner.

This distinction is particularly true of quantitative data, which has been fundamental to the development of administrative systems and the bureaucracy of the modern state. Modern epidemiology, for example, relies on the work of proto data pioneers such as William Farr, who developed the first national vital statistics system in the UK of the mid-1800s. Today’s data scientists and researchers use large-scale data, artificial intelligence and machine learning applications to study the brain, accelerate the production of Covid-19 vaccines, and much more.

Data has both a commercial and societal benefit. But it is not as simple as “more data equals more value.” Data is a non-rivalrous good, which is a technical way of saying it doesn’t get used up when it’s consumed. Burn oil and it’s gone forever. Make use of a data point and it still exists to be used again. Having a great big stockpile of it is not in and of itself particularly valuable. It’s what you do with it that counts. The value of data stems from the quality of insights it can produce. Think of it this way: a long list of random words has much less value than a beautifully-written poem. The same principle applies to databases — a large database that includes random data points has little to no value (certainly to organizations without highly sophisticated systems capable of analyzing it), while a small database with well-connected data points can have great value.

No value is derived from the mere collection or storage of data. Unlike oil, the value of data depends on the context within which it is placed. A database about people’s clothing preferences is much more valuable to a clothing retailer than it is to a restaurant chain, and vice versa for a database full of people’s dining preferences. Yet the source of the data in both cases could be the same individual with a profile in the Banana Republic and OpenTable websites.

And, unlike oil, the value of data reduces over time. That is, the value of this year’s data is much greater than the value of last year’s data, and so on. My telephone number from last year, which I have since changed, has almost zero value to advertisers or anyone else. If a company has a spreadsheet full of customers’ phone numbers, at what point is it no longer valuable? Is it when 5% of the numbers are no longer correct? 10%? 15%? And even if the “value” is positive, how much value must exist in order to justify a business decision to invest in generating new data?

None of this is to deny for a moment that data is often extremely valuable for organizations who know how to make use of what they have — whether they are a Silicon Valley tech company, a German car manufacturer or a local fast food delivery service. Not to mention charities or government health ministries. Gathering, storing and analyzing data at scale is very valuable indeed when it is high quality data that you know how to gain relevant insights from. But its value is very different to that of a scarce natural resource, and it is not constrained by how often or where it is processed, utilized, and consumed.

The Interconnected Data Society

While data has been gathered in one form or another for centuries, it is the onset of the internet age that fundamentally changed our ability to gather and utilize it, turbo-charging its impact on society. Vellum parchment gave us the Domesday Book, but copying data was a laborious manual task, so its impact was limited. But step by step, technology has allowed us to make more of it. From index card systems to IBM’s automated machines, the invention of digital memory, microprocessors that could sort through that memory, the network, the internet, mobile technology and artificial intelligence — at each stage new technology has massively increased the utility of data.

More than 3.5 billion people use Meta’s apps — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger — every month. It’s a staggering number, and it’s worth dwelling on for a moment. It means that between a third and half of all human beings on Earth use them. And in doing so, they have access to an interconnected world of people, ideas, news, communities and commerce unconstrained by local or national boundaries. This scale of connectedness is unprecedented in human history.

It’s hard to overstate how important digital services have become to today’s global economy. Data-driven technologies have contributed to growth and improved living standards the world over. It isn’t just that the internet provides a faster or more convenient way of connecting businesses to customers. Data-based products empower individuals, for example by allowing them to compare prices at the touch of a button. They dramatically reduce costs and inefficiencies for businesses. And datasets can be aggregated and cross-referenced to gather new insights and identify opportunities that would otherwise have been invisible.

Processing and analyzing large quantities of data is now fundamental to how organizations in every sector operate. It is commonly understood that data is associated with medicine, telecommunications, banking and transportation, not to mention the administering of public services. Likewise, every professional sport — from football to gymnastics to aquatics — relies today on detailed data analysis to evaluate performance, draft prospects, and advance training methods. Even Artificial Intelligence — the training of computer systems to do things that have traditionally required human intelligence to do — and its subset Machine Learning — where a computer system can learn and train itself without explicit programming — are no longer the domain of technology companies alone.

The proliferation of accessible data-driven tools has not only been a boon for the global economy overall, it has also helped to democratize access to it, leveling the playing field between small businesses and big corporations. With social media apps and user-friendly e-commerce websites, people can start businesses online without the need for a big bank loan to pay for major overheads like renting a shopfront or office space. And with personalized digital ads they can reach targeted audiences of potential customers for just a few dollars, rather than the deep pockets required for mass-market TV, radio or billboard campaigns. This is especially true for people in rural communities and developing economies, where people with enormous talent and potential have been held back by poor infrastructure and their remoteness from metropolitan economic centers.

This democratization of access has in large part been made possible because many of the digital tools people use to access the open internet — including Meta’s apps — are free to use. And it is only possible for them to be made available for free because of business models based on data-driven advertising. If companies like Meta instead started charging users a fee for their core services, it would immediately exclude millions of people — probably billions — from using them.

So-called “big data” — commonly understood to mean the combination of huge storage capacity with advanced processing power, often aided by machine learning systems — presents enormous opportunities, economically and socially. But like all technological revolutions, these opportunities are accompanied by a new range of risks, dilemmas and challenges. As with previous technological advances, societies need to agree the parameters in which technology can operate and put in place guardrails that enable the good and mitigate the bad. And governments and other institutions need to find ways to harness the opportunities big data presents in helping to address all manner of societal challenges.

Through its Data for Good program, established in 2017, Meta has been part of an unprecedented collaboration between technology companies, the public sector, universities, nonprofits and others to aid disaster relief, support economic recovery, and inform policy and decision making. In recent years, the Data for Good program has informed the delivery of medical aid and financial relief in Ukraine, vaccination initiatives in the Caribbean, Brazil and the Philippines, disaster response in Mozambique, and enabled pioneering studies into things like economic connectedness, attitudes towards climate change, and the challenges facing small businesses globally.

The internet needs guardrails, not roadblocks

Governments and regulators across the world are now grappling with the wide range of issues thrown up by the swift onset of the digital age: from the bumper digital markets and services acts in the EU, to the antitrust debates in the United States, online harms legislation in the United Kingdom and Ireland, or data protection laws proposed in India and elsewhere. These debates are long overdue — many of the issues at stake are too important to be left to private companies alone, which is why Meta has been publicly advocating for regulation in a number of areas for some time now.

But we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. For governments, demanding greater sovereignty over data is a natural and understandable impulse, especially as other nations do the same. Many are drawn to the idea that by establishing digital walls at their national borders they can prevent data generated by their citizens from supposedly being extracted by powerful interests based overseas — in effect, treating it like oil reserves and preventing it from being exported. But this idea ignores the aggregation and network benefits of cross-border data flows.

These data flows are fundamental to the way the internet operates. Fixating on where data is stored and processed is a red herring — its value can be derived regardless of where in the world it is stored.

Because of how the global internet was built and has evolved, international data transfers occur as part of almost every online communication or activity. The internet was built to be a decentralized patchwork of tens of thousands of different networks that connect with and “talk to” one another by using standard technical protocols. Each of these networks routes data around the globe. The networks are generally agnostic of the physical “journey” of the data and instead optimize routing in real time to reduce latency and increase network resilience. Data localization policies impose unnecessary costs and technical challenges on what should be efficiency-based decision-making processes, making them market blockers rather than the drivers of economic growth some imagine them to be.

The independent think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) found a direct link between restrictive data policies, lower economic productivity and increased prices. In a report published last July, it found:

Restricting data flows has a statistically significant impact on a nation’s economy — sharply reducing its total volume of trade, lowering its productivity, and increasing prices for downstream industries that increasingly rely on data.

Using a scale based on OECD market-regulation data, ITIF finds that a 1‑point increase in a nation’s data restrictiveness cuts its gross trade output 7 percent, slows its productivity 2.9 percent, and hikes downstream prices 1.5 percent over five years.

ITIF also estimated the impact of restrictive data policies introduced in specific countries:

For Indonesia, the model estimates that over the five years, its more-significant data restrictions reduced GOVs [gross output volumes] by 7.8 percent, lowered productivity by 3.2 percent, and raised prices by 1.6 percent. In the case of Russia, its heightened data restrictions between 2013 and 2018 cost an estimated 4.9 percent reduction in trade volume, a 2.0 percent reduction in productivity, and a 1.0 percent increase in prices of goods and services on average nationally.

Data-based technologies create value in ways that are radically different from older forms of economic and social organization. The harnessing of data has transformed our society dramatically and has the potential to continue to do so long into the future. Many of the consequences will be wonderful, others will be damaging. The task at hand is to maximize the former and minimize the latter.

Yes, Meta has an obvious self-interest in this debate. It’s a global company whose services depend on its ability to store, transfer, and process data at scale. But it is far from alone. Millions of businesses share data across borders — corporations and startups alike — and millions more rely on data-driven products. The products and services these companies provide have become a part of everyday life for billions of people. It is integral to every sector and every type of organization — from banking and travel, to government and scientific researchers. And it has enabled millions of small businesses to do things that were previously out of their reach — from trading internationally to accessing payroll services or project management tools.

Meta could disappear from the face of the Earth and there would still be an overwhelming argument against data localization policies because the open internet is a guarantee of prosperity and freedom of thought that should be preserved in perpetuity. The repercussions of fragmenting the global internet will be felt far beyond the primary-colored campuses of Silicon Valley and the glass and steel towers of multinational corporations.

The risk we face is that as digital nationalism reshapes the internet piece by piece — new digital border by new digital border — its fundamental character will change. With each new national restriction, the internet becomes a little less free, and the digital economy becomes a little bit more constrained. Slowly, the authoritarian internet replaces the open internet; and authoritarian values replace democratic ones online.

We need a counterweight. Democracies must recognize and actively promote and defend the idea of the open internet. The announcement earlier this year of an agreement to protect open data flows between the US and the EU is a necessary step, as are the principles enshrined in the Declaration for the Future of the Internet announced by the Biden administration and signed by more than 60 national governments earlier this year. Likewise, the Copenhagen Pledge on Tech and Democracy — which now has more than 90 signatories — is a strong commitment to make digital technologies work for, not against, democracy and human rights.

These initiatives are welcome signs of leadership from the democratic world. We need them to turn into concrete actions.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) could be a place to strike a deal between countries on data flows. In fact, leading WTO countries have taken steps towards forging a new global trade agreement on digital economy issues, including addressing the free flow of data and other provisions to facilitate cross-border electronic commerce. The 2019 plurilateral joint statement on “e-commerce” is the most significant of those steps, and has now been signed by 86 WTO countries that represent 90% of global trade.

The statement includes the US and China, but notably not India. As the world’s largest democracy, India could play a pivotal role in the future of the open internet. Persuading India — and others — to join the e-commerce negotiations would be a significant breakthrough.

With so much technological progress taking place over a relatively short space of time, we undoubtedly need new rules of the road to govern the use of data in modern society. But as they are designed we need to be careful not to lose the benefits that today’s data-driven technologies have created — or those that tomorrow’s technologies could bring.

Data isn’t oil, and that means that those who want to design systems to ensure it is properly and responsibly managed — whether private companies or government regulators — have to think about it differently. Data can be a force for good, and it needn’t come at people’s expense. It is absolutely possible to design proper technical architectures to maximize the benefits of the data economy while minimizing the possible harms.

We need to create guardrails for the internet, not roadblocks. The challenge for policymakers is crafting new rules that take advantage of the great benefits that data-driven technologies bring to their societies and economies, while keeping people safe and protecting their privacy. The more this can be done at a global level the better, so we avoid creating regulatory silos and barriers to the seamless flows of data that make the open internet possible.

The further fracturing of the global internet is not inevitable. But preventing it will take leadership from those who believe in the democratic values that have made the internet the great liberating tool that it is today.

When Facebook rebranded as Meta last October, it brought into the mainstream a concept that has been exciting the bright minds of Silicon Valley for years: the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg’s unveiling of a vision for a new era of integrated, immersive technologies was met with enthusiasm in some quarters, and cynicism in others. It’s easy to see why. Skepticism is a natural reaction to something that sounds like it’s straight out of a science fiction novel — in a way, it is — especially when there are wider societal concerns about how tech operates in the two-dimensional world.

Many rightly ask: what is the metaverse and why should I care? And even if I can be persuaded that it is worth getting excited about, how can I trust that these new technologies will be built and governed responsibly?

When Facebook started 18 years ago, we mostly typed text on websites. When we got phones with cameras, the internet became more visual and mobile. As connections got faster, video became a richer way to share things. We’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video.

In this progression, the metaverse is a logical evolution. It’s the next generation of the internet — a more immersive, 3D experience. Its defining quality will be a feeling of presence, like you are right there with another person or in another place.

A wide range of technology companies — from big players like Microsoft and Google to smaller ones like Niantic and Emblematic — are already building experiences and products for the metaverse. Early versions of it already exist in the virtual worlds of games like Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite. It incorporates technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) that, while still young, have been in use for some time.

And all of us have a stake in the metaverse. It isn’t an idea Meta has cooked up. There won’t be a Meta-run metaverse, just as there isn’t a ‘Microsoft internet’ or ‘Google internet’ today.

The metaverse isn’t just about the detached worlds of VR, where we don headsets that take us out of our environment in the physical world and transport us somewhere new. VR is one end of a spectrum. It stretches from using avatars or accessing metaverse spaces on your phone, through AR glasses that project computer-generated images onto the world around us, to mixed reality experiences that blend both physical and virtual environments.

The word ‘metaverse’ is actually a little misleading, as ‘verse’ implies you are transported to another ‘universe’. Of course, there is escapism inherent in using some of these technologies — like an immersive gaming experience. But the metaverse is much more than that. It’s ultimately about finding ever more ways for the benefits of the online world to be felt in our daily lives — enriching our experiences, not replacing them.

Imagine, for example, how useful it could be to wear glasses that give you virtual directions in your line of sight, or immediate translations of street signs in foreign languages. Or even make it possible for you to have a conversation with someone who is thousands of miles away as a three-dimensional hologram in your living room instead of a head and shoulders on a flat screen. And, as I will go on to explain in more detail, the potential societal benefits — particularly in education and healthcare — are vast, from helping med students practice surgical techniques to bringing school lessons to life in new and exciting ways.

As someone in their mid-50s who has spent most of my career in British and European politics rather than Silicon Valley, it wasn’t until I started using some of the early products that I started to properly grasp the potential. For several months now my close team has been meeting weekly in Meta’s Horizon Workrooms app, in which you interact with colleagues as avatars in virtual meeting rooms, complete with whiteboards, boardroom tables, wall art, and futuristic cityscapes visible through the windows. Yes, we are meeting as stylized representations of ourselves, but there really is something about the sense of place and space, and the directional sound in particular, that makes the meetings feel much more human than talking to thumbnail faces on a laptop.

We can exchange glances and private asides with the person next to us, get someone’s attention with a gesture, even read each other’s body language — rudimentary as it is when we are blemish free avatars. I can be in my home in northern California talking to a colleague an ocean away in his garage in Milton Keynes, England, and yet it feels like he’s sat three feet to my left. If he gesticulates too wildly while disagreeing with me, I get a genuine urge to lean away.

Different technologies will enable different levels of immersion that suit the individual and their environment. They won’t be a replacement for our experiences in daily life any more than the internet is today. What they will be is a way to build on the interconnectedness the internet enables, so that we can do more and have even richer experiences. All this has the potential to unlock new opportunities and spark new ideas we haven’t yet imagined, and to have a huge positive impact both socially and economically.

For people to actually want to use these technologies, they will need to feel safe. Companies like Meta have a lot of work to do both to build the credibility of the metaverse as an idea, and to demonstrate to people that we are committed to building it in a responsible way. That starts by explaining as best we can what our vision for these technologies is and the challenges we believe will need to be considered as it develops. It means being open and transparent about the work we’re doing and the choices and trade-offs inherent in it. It means drawing on existing work to protect marginalized communities online, and listening to human and civil rights, privacy, and disabilities experts as systems and processes are developed to keep people safe. And it means being clear that our intention is not to develop these technologies on our own, but to be one part of a wider technological movement.

The metaverse is at a critical early stage in its development. There is nothing deterministic in the way a technology impacts society. Technology isn’t good or bad in and of itself. People will use it as they see fit — and people will misuse it as well. Just as we have seen how problems in our physical society have manifested on the internet, they will reoccur in any system or platform regardless of what it is or who builds it. That is why we must create thoughtful rules and put guardrails into place as the metaverse develops to maximize its potential for good and minimize the potential harms.

Done well, the metaverse could be a positive force for inclusion and equity, bridging some of the divides that exist in today’s physical and digital spaces.

Collectively, we can think of this process as developing a system of governance for the metaverse. And it mustn’t be shaped by tech companies like Meta on their own. It needs to be developed openly with a spirit of cooperation between the private sector, lawmakers, civil society, academia, and the people who will use these technologies. This effort must be undertaken in the best interests of people and society, not just technology companies.

In this essay, I’ll set out why the metaverse is a compelling new evolution of the internet; some of the potential benefits it creates for education, healthcare and economic opportunity; the importance of building it in a way that ensures it is open and interoperable; some early thoughts on how to approach questions of governance; and how I believe we have time on our side to ensure it is built collaboratively and responsibly.

In doing so, I hope to shed some light on how Meta intends to go about this work. In turn, I hope that a better understanding of our approach will help others — in both the private and public realms — to make informed decisions of their own about what they want in this next phase of the internet.

We already have the internet — do we really need the metaverse?

Earlier, I described the metaverse as a logical evolution of the internet. It’s worth taking a moment to explain the logic. Since the advent of the internet, we’ve moved from chunky computers tethered to dial-up phone lines, to laptops and tablets connected without wires, to phones that allow us to carry the internet with us wherever we go, as well as internet-accessible cars, watches and all manner of household devices. This evolution has been driven in part by increases in the speed and availability of internet connectivity. And each step in this evolution has made communication and interaction easier and more natural.

We don’t communicate through written words alone, so text-based internet services would never suffice. Static images are an important part of how we communicate, as are sounds and moving images. But we interact in three dimensions. We use multiple senses, body language, spatial awareness. We signify our intention to trust one another by looking each other in the eye, smiling, or warmly shaking hands. We express our feelings towards loved ones not only by saying what we feel but by expressing it physically. We show joy, sadness or anger through nonverbal cues that are embodied and experienced rather than written down.

Advances in speed and availability of connectivity have now reached a point that begins to make many of these three-dimensional interactions possible virtually. It is therefore logical that the next step in the evolution of the internet is one that reflects this.

There are three key factors that will make interactions in the metaverse feel more like those we have in our daily lives: ephemerality, embodiment and immersion.

• Ephemerality: In the physical world, most of our daily communications are ephemeral: we speak, people hear us, and no long-term record of what we said exists. In contrast, emails, text messages, and written posts on social media are often persistent, creating a record that lasts over time and which can be inspected, reviewed, modified or deleted. The metaverse will constitute a shift towards live, speech-based communication that will often feel as transient as face-to-face conversations. Just as in the physical world, this kind of ephemeral communication will exist alongside persistent messages and communication, but is likely to be far more common. If I want to communicate with you in today’s internet, the first thing I’d do is write text — a post or message, for example. But to communicate with you in a shared metaverse space, I would speak.
• Embodiment: In the metaverse we will be able to communicate not only through typing on a keyboard or looking at a screen, but through our physicality. Avatars will reflect our real bodily movements. This will allow us to communicate more expressively, to use our hands to create and manipulate digital objects, and to interact with our virtual 3D environment. This real-time, 3D synchronicity is a crucial difference with the way we interact in today’s internet.
• Immersion: In the metaverse, we will communicate in ways that make us feel as if we are actually in a specific space with other people — shared environments where social interaction feels natural, like a conversation with friends in a coffee shop, restaurant, or at home. We often talk about getting immersed in a good book or losing ourselves in a song. But no other form of communication has so far been able to achieve the sort of audiovisual fidelity necessary to create the feeling of being in a shared space that is possible in the metaverse.

Empirical evidence from countless social science research studies corroborates this notion that nonverbal/embodied forms of communication are crucial to the cultivation of social trust, and to the development of a shared sense of community with others. For example, in their influential book Wired for Speech, Clifford Nash and Scott Brave argue that we evolved to understand the world and to communicate primarily through speech, rather than writing, and therefore functional speech-based interfaces represent an improvement in the way we communicate online.

These attributes — ephemerality, embodiment and immersion — mean people will experience the metaverse in a way that is much closer to physical world interactions than to the experience of using a mobile app or website. In this way, the metaverse isn’t analogous to a mobile app like Facebook or Instagram. It’s closer to a universal, virtual layer that everyone can experience on top of today’s physical world — one where you can have a consistent identity (or even set of identities) that people can recognize wherever they see you.

For this to become a reality, no single company can or should control the metaverse — but different experiences will need to be compatible if, for example, you want to be able to bring a photo you took in one space into another, or to use the same avatar to represent your virtual identity in different places.

The possibilities for education, health and economic opportunity

I appreciate that none of this is easy to visualize. These technologies are nascent. Today, VR and AR are used primarily for gaming, and the often cartoonish experiences that exist right now will no doubt feel quaint in a few short years. The great leap forward that companies like Meta believe is possible hasn’t happened yet. Many of the benefits that technologists espouse will be unlocked by advances that are still to come. But they are possible. The technology may be virtual, but the impact it will have on education, healthcare, commerce and much more will be very real.

Think about what it could mean for education and training. The internet has already transformed the way we learn. Search engines make fact-finding virtually instant. We carry around an infinite library in our pockets on devices slimmer than a paperback book. Classes can be taught by video conferencing or live-streaming. The metaverse promises to make learning more active. We will be able to learn by doing and not just passively absorbing information. We’ll be able to learn in 3D — bringing the study of architecture, or history, or even basic geometry to life in ways white boards and flat screens never could.

Learning won’t be limited by geographical location — a student in Mumbai could attend a seminar hosted by a Professor in Frankfurt; a middle school class in Wyoming could take a field trip to Stonehenge or the Pyramids of Giza. Indeed, they could experience these landmarks as they would have been at the time of the Druids and Pharaohs.

The potential for revolutionizing education and training is one of the things Meta is investing in early through a $150 million fund called Meta Immersive Learning. One project it has supported is a partnership with Prisms VR, run by a former teacher, to build a virtual Math and Science curriculum for grades 8–12, which is currently being piloted in Ohio with plans to expand to Boston and Los Angeles. Another is a partnership with Victory XR to launch 10 digital twin campuses — replicas of existing campuses constructed in fully spatial 3D, at colleges and universities in the United States. In these virtual campuses, students will be able to move about, socialize, learn and compete in activities, and take part in classes they can access remotely.

Meta is also providing VR headsets for all the students for use during the course they are taking. This touches on an important point about access to the metaverse. Obviously, anything that is dependent on hardware comes with a cost, and anything that comes with a cost will make it harder, even prohibitive, for some people on low incomes. There will be many low cost entry points to the metaverse — including through mobile phones — but to buy VR headsets some level of cost will be unavoidable. As part of Meta’s efforts to ensure it is actively considering diversity, equity and inclusivity as it works to help build the metaverse, we are determined to make our headsets as affordable as possible.

Another area where metaverse technologies have the potential to be transformative is healthcare. There are endless possibilities for training healthcare professionals — from practicing surgeries without risk to patients or training first responders without putting them in dangerous situations, to making med school more accessible by removing geographical and other barriers. Recent studies have also looked at the ways virtual reality can be used for pediatric pain management, children with autism, and depression.

Augmented reality also has the potential to be transformative. This article suggests nine ways that AR could be utilized: saving lives by showing people where nearby defibrillators are; assisting surgeons during operations; helping new mothers with breastfeeding; helping patients better describe symptoms; helping nurses find veins more easily; showing people how drugs work in 3D; helping medical students visualize anatomy; teaching kids about the human body; and even motivating runners by having them chased by virtual zombies.

Now, think of the economic possibilities. For the last three decades we’ve been in the midst of a global digital transformation. As more and more people use the internet and connections have become faster and more accessible, businesses and institutions of all sorts have increasingly gone digital to reach them — a trend that accelerated dramatically during the pandemic. Today, the widespread use of digital tools by businesses of all shapes and sizes means the digital economy is absolutely central to the global economy.

The digital economy contributed $2.1 trillion to the US GDP in 2019. Even if the metaverse went on to account for the equivalent of just 10% of the pre-pandemic US digital economy, it would be a $200 billion industry, employing somewhere in the region of 770,000 people.

A white paper produced for Meta by the independent economic consultancy Analysis Group has estimated the metaverse economy could be worth more than $3 trillion globally in a decade.

An industry this massive would also be a job creation engine — and those jobs wouldn’t be limited to the campuses of Silicon Valley. In 2020, the mobile technology sector directly employed about 12 million people globally, and indirectly employed another 13 million people. The metaverse economy will not only include the industries that will create its infrastructure, including hardware, software, payment systems, and broadband providers, but also sectors like e-commerce, education, gaming and more which will provide goods and services associated with it. When social spaces are created in the metaverse, people will need to be employed to manage and maintain them, just as they are in the physical world.

For its part, Meta may be based in California but it is a global company with a global workforce. In recent months it has announced the creation of thousands of jobs in Europe and Canada to help build the metaverse, and there will be many more created around the world in the years ahead.

This digital transformation has not only been a boon for the global economy overall, it has also helped to democratize access to it and opened up a new world of economic opportunities. Before the internet, if you wanted to start a business, you needed to get a loan from a bank and have a physical presence on a high street or in an office. If you wanted to advertise, you needed to walk around handing out flyers, or to buy very limited space on a handful of TV networks that charged huge amounts, or in a local newspaper.

When the internet came along, all of a sudden you could start a business without a big loan. You didn’t need a shopfront or an office, you could do it from your living room. You could advertise for small amounts of money to targeted audiences of people you thought might be interested in the products and services you provide. The internet and social media have made it possible for people to express themselves, reach like-minded people, and start businesses in ways that simply weren’t possible before, which in turn benefited those who have historically been marginalized or discriminated against — women, LGBTQ+ people, those with disabilities, veterans, underrepresented minorities, and others.

We don’t know what the metaverse economy will look like yet. But it’s hard to imagine the direction of travel will change. The digital transformation will only be enhanced by the metaverse, democratizing access even further and making it a powerful force for greater access and diversity. It will be possible to create more immersive, more social, more detailed experiences than ever before, all from your living room — or your spare room, or garage, or wherever it is you do your Zoom meetings.

In its infancy, no one could have imagined the overwhelming impact the internet would have on commerce. And it is the same right now with the metaverse.

A new generation of entrepreneurs will have much more creative ideas than this, but it’s easy to imagine how, say, a fashion designer or clothing retailer could benefit by making their outfits available to be tried on in a virtual fitting room. And there’s a huge opportunity for developers — not just for the large developers building for the metaverse today, but for a new generation of independent creative professionals who will be able to access the tools necessary to create amazing spaces and experiences.

Ensuring an open metaverse

As the technologies and their uses develop, guardrails need to be put in place to mitigate the risks and accentuate the positives. So what sort of guardrails are required for these new forms of immersive and immediate social interaction? And who gets to set the rules?

The metaverse is not a single product, in the way Meta’s apps — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp — are. Nor is it an operating system like Microsoft’s Windows, or hardware like Apple’s iPhone. Like today’s internet, the metaverse will be a constellation of technologies, platforms, and products. It won’t be built, operated or governed by any one company or institution. It will take a range of companies large and small, civil society, the public sector, and millions of individual creators. It isn’t a single piece of cloth, but a patchwork quilt.

Given the varied mix of companies, institutions and people who will operate spaces in the metaverse, the rules for what happens in them will be set in a variety of ways. The scholar Helen Nissenbaum coined the phrase ‘contextual integrity’ to describe the way norms and expectations around the sharing of information differ depending on social context. In her book Privacy in Context, she gives the example of your relationship with your doctor — a situation in which you are prepared to share information you likely wouldn’t choose to share with your friends. When it comes to making content policy rules, one size is not going to fit all — there will be different expectations, and therefore different rules and norms established, in different spaces.

Of course, like the internet, the metaverse will be an interconnected system that transcends national borders, so there will need to be a web of public and private standards, norms and rules to allow for it to operate across jurisdictions.

One way to think about the structure of the metaverse is to imagine a building, where each floor supports the one above it. For each floor, and within each floor, there will be different kinds of rules and regulations required.

Foundations — hardware, protocols and standards

The foundations of the building include the hardware — phones, VR headsets, AR glasses, etc.— and the technical protocols and standards that ensure the various technologies can interact, or be ‘interoperable’ in the jargon.

Ground floor — platforms and networks

The ground floor of the metaverse will be built on top of these interoperable protocols and standards. This is the intermediary layer where platforms, institutions and other networks will create the universe of products that make up the 3D worlds of the metaverse.

First floor — experiences

The first floor of the metaverse is where you’ll access it as a user, and where the vast array of experiences will be available. Current Quest users, for example, can access the metaverse through social VR apps like Horizon Worlds. Apps and experiences will support the ability for creators to design a multitude of unique spaces.

The common theme across these floors is interoperability — the interconnectedness of standards, systems and applications that enable people to travel seamlessly between one part of the metaverse and another. It isn’t an absolute — not every element of metaverse experiences needs to be, or will be, compatible with others. But without a significant degree of interoperability baked into each floor, the metaverse will become fragmented and broken into silos, each impenetrable from the other.

As has been the case throughout the internet’s development, interoperable standards and protocols will be developed by different people and companies over time, and will often be settled by institutions like the US-based National Institute of Standards and Technology or international multi-stakeholder organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force or the World Wide Web Consortium.

An example of interoperable standards is the HTML language that developers use to build websites, and which all internet browsers can read. Common hardware standards are things like USB ports that allow different devices to connect together. These are crucial because they provide a common foundation that allows seamless communication across different devices and platforms.

Because the ground floor’s platforms and networks will be built on this foundational layer, they will have the potential for interoperability. Of course, there’s nothing inevitable about individual companies adopting industry-wide standards, but they will have a strong incentive to align on ways for consumers to take digital goods such as clothing for avatars from one platform to another.

For those who think the risk of a fragmented metaverse is theoretical, look what has happened in the current internet. We have two operating systems that effectively create walled gardens — and in Apple’s case, a walled garden that is increasingly vertically integrated. As interoperability develops it needs to be driven by the interests of users, so that they are not randomly locked into one silo or another.

Its development will likely follow the same path as the existing internet — piece by piece, standard by standard, driven by a mixture of public and private initiatives.

Take the history of an internet technology that is commonplace today: the Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF for short. Up until the late ’80s, each computer manufacturer would develop their own proprietary computer language for displaying images on a screen. This, in turn, made sharing images between different computer brands a technologically challenging task. In 1987, Steve Wilhite, a programmer who worked in an online service company called CompuServe, came up with a universal image sharing computer language — GIF — that revolutionized the process of sharing images online. From then on, the images that users shared on CompuServe’s network would be readable by any computer, no matter the brand. Wilhite’s innovation, which was formed on the idea that we need a common interchangeable computer language to share information between devices, helped pave the way for the next generation of the internet, which was centered around the sharing of images rather than just text.

Other internet technologies have longer and even more complicated histories than the GIF. Email, for example, has a history of more than fifty years of technical standards evolution. And the list goes on: sharing a video, creating a webpage, even texting someone, requires the development and adoption of a common technical language. Today, the internet is open and accessible to billions of people because of the work of standards-setting bodies like the IETF or the W3C, the innovations of luminaries like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn who developed the TCP/IP protocol, government projects like ARPA, and the creations of companies like CompuServe.

We should have the same expectations of openness and universal access for the metaverse. It will need to be developed from the ground up by a new generation of developers like Steve Wilhite; driven by a mixture of private and public initiatives that will develop and help adopt interoperable standards over time. This is a case made powerfully in an essay by Matthew Ball and Jacob Navok, espousing the virtues of what they call ‘Interchange Tools and Standards’ in the metaverse:

The Metaverse will not develop as the internet did. Public institutions, military research labs, and independent academics led the latter’s development because they were effectively the only ones with the computational talent, resources, and ambitions to build a World Wide Web, and few in industry understood its commercial potential. None of this is true when it comes to the Metaverse.

But we still want the Metaverse to flourish as the internet did. We want as many new platforms, technologies, and companies to be created — to maximize the number of Metaverse users, and the devices it reaches — while also checking the rent-seeking instincts of dominant platforms. To do so, we will need an ecosystem of ‘interchange’ solutions that interconnect, translate, and exchange information/users/assets across and between myriad different and competing platforms. It’s not enough to have more powerful hardware, computer, networks, virtual platforms, and Metaverse tools and technologies.

Interoperability isn’t just an abstract technical idea. It will be crucial to people’s experiences in the metaverse. Imagine, for example, that two friends want to go together to a concert taking place in Horizon Worlds. If they both click the link to the concert venue from different starting points, there will need to be a common protocol for travel to ensure they can end up at the same place in the metaverse.

If they buy a t-shirt at the concert, they’ll want to be able to take it with them and not just be limited to wearing it in Meta-built experiences. To do so will require digital items created in different places to be compatible and accessible across metaverse spaces, just as photos or other images can be used to display images across websites, social media apps and devices designed and operated by different companies. Digital items for avatars — or any 3D objects that someone might wish to take with them throughout the metaverse — will need to be like GIF or JPEG image files in today’s internet.

A metaverse that is open and interconnected is not only the right thing for users — and something that will involve both technical and policy work from industry and regulators — it is also the sort of thing that might come to distinguish the metaverse in the parts of the world that still believe in an open internet from the metaverses built in other parts of the world where a closed internet has been constructed in recent years.

The borderless and largely free internet that you and I use every day is being challenged in many parts of the world by an alternative model: the authoritarian internet. Some governments are building digital barriers at their borders and imposing greater control over the internet inside them, creating rules and infrastructure to monitor and censor users, and partitioning the internet into a series of national and regional silos.

This is how the internet operates in China, and others are moving in this direction. Not least Russia, whose actions in the weeks following its brutal invasion of Ukraine accelerated its own divorce from the global internet — restricting or blocking social media services, clamping down on the media and the free expression of its citizens, and cutting them off from the world beyond Russia’s borders.

The rise of the authoritarian internet represents an ideological challenge to the open internet as we know it. That’s why, with investment in metaverse technologies happening all over the world, the values which underpin how these technologies are constructed are as important in this coming phase of the internet as they are in the current one. While ideas like interoperability may sound dry and arcane to non-technical ears, they matter because ensuring the fundamental architecture of the metaverse is as open and accessible as possible will have profound implications for how we experience it for generations to come.

What sort of rules do we need?

The rules and safety features of the metaverse — regardless of the floor — will not be identical to the ones currently in place for social media. Nor should they be. In many ways, user experiences in the metaverse will be more akin to physical reality than the two-dimensional internet.

For example, you and I might create a metaverse space — like a virtual living room — where we can get together with a small group of our friends to hang out, chat, gossip, and generally put the world to rights in the way we all do when we catch up with friends. It won’t be a public space where anyone can turn up and join in, just a private space for friends. We will be the architects of our space and we will decide how it’s used — just as we can invite people into our homes for private conversations in our living rooms. In this situation, we wouldn’t want or expect a private company to be listening in on our conversation, in the way that we would expect a social media company to see our conversation if we were posting on Facebook or Twitter.

Of course, the unique characteristics of the metaverse will contribute to negative as well as positive experiences. For example, a sense of immersion can heighten the emotional impact of offensive or aggressive interactions that would probably be less affecting in a 2D, text-based environment. One measure Meta has taken with this concept in mind is the introduction of a personal boundary around one’s avatar, which is intended to create personal space for each user, so that their safety is better protected.

But formal rules and built-in functions will only ever get us so far. In the physical world, as well as the internet, people shout and swear and do all kinds of unpleasant things that aren’t prohibited by law, and they harass and attack people in ways that are. The metaverse will be no different. People who want to misuse technologies will always find ways to do it.

The current debate about how to handle bad-but-not-illegal conduct on social media and the internet hints at the debates to come about how to treat anti-social behavior in the metaverse.

Companies and developers will have to create new formal rules for their spaces. While some may be readily developed based upon lessons of the internet, others will be new and evolving. And as in all societies, informal and unwritten codes of acceptable behavior will also develop over time. In many cases, the operators of the apps and creators of experiences will want to nurture the development of healthy norms rather than falling back on exhaustive and impractical lists of what users can and can’t say or do.

Consider a scenario in a more public metaverse space than our private living room. Two friends — let’s call them Bhavika and Elijah — meet in a virtual bar in the metaverse. The bar owner, a 23-year-old developer from Sweden, has set very clear rules of conduct which are displayed to every customer before they enter: everyone is welcome as long as you are over 21; you can say anything you want; but no physical aggression, however small, is allowed. Anyone who violates these rules will be kicked out.

Bhavika and Elijah like the idea of open and free conversation that this bar promotes, and they’ve heard it’s a place where new and radical political ideas are debated. When they enter, however, they quickly realize that the heated conversation taking place at that moment involves an uncomfortable amount of abusive language. Disliking what they see and hear, they decide to leave the place and report their experiences to the company that hosts the virtual bar’s data on its servers.

Who is responsible for Bhavika’s and Elijah’s experience? What are the bar owner’s responsibilities? And what are the rules that should be imposed by the company that hosts the bar’s data?

Answers to these questions will most likely deviate considerably from the sort of rules imposed in the internet world — like a social media platform’s community standards — not least because this situation involves live speech rather than posted text. In fact, the immediacy of metaverse spaces makes it more likely that this sort of synchronous, ephemeral communication will be far more prevalent than the tangible, text-based communication that dominates much of today’s internet. So, in this case, a better place to look for answers may be the existing rules and norms that govern bars in physical reality.

For example, in the US, we wouldn’t hold a bar manager responsible for real-time speech moderation in their bar, as if they should stand over your table, listen intently to your conversation, and silence you if they hear things they don’t like. But the bar manager would be held accountable if they served alcohol to people who are under-age. We would expect them to use their discretion to exclude disruptive customers who don’t respond to reasonable warnings about their behavior. And we would expect customers who were upset by aggressive or inappropriate speech to be able to speak to the manager about it, and for some kind of action to result.

In metaverse spaces, we could reasonably expect to be able to report this behavior without the need for our conversations to be stored indefinitely on a company’s server. For example, for Meta Quest users in Horizon Worlds, a rolling buffer is available so that most audio data can be kept for just a short period — for privacy reasons this is kept on the device, not Meta’s servers — to ensure it is available for users to report abuse or harmful conduct. If they don’t submit a report the data is deleted. As well as reporting, they also have the option to block or mute people, as well as being able to leave the space immediately via the Oculus button on their controllers.

A great example of a company taking a thoughtful, context-driven approach to issues of negative behavior online is Good Game Well Played, led by Dennis Fong, a gamer and entrepreneur who created his AI-powered moderation platform to help games publishers respond to user reports. Its player report management system aggregates, triages, and prioritizes player reports and provides context around incidents by displaying historical and holistic data on the players involved, including their reputation scores, credibility rating, and the severity of the incident.

Time is on our side

This is all futuristic stuff — but as with all major technological advances there are going to be big challenges and uncertainties. In the past, the speed with which new technologies have emerged has sometimes left policymakers and regulators playing catch-up. Companies get accused of charging ahead too quickly, while innovators have felt that technological progress can’t afford to wait for the slower pace of regulation. Guardrails around new technologies were at times retrofitted with the plane already in full flight. Cars were on the road for decades before regulators made seatbelts mandatory.

That doesn’t have to be the case this time round. The technologies being described are certainly no less ground-breaking. The crucial difference today is that time is on our side. It may not always feel like it when so many different companies are talking up these technologies and announcing new products and initiatives. But these innovations aren’t going to happen overnight. We’re in the early stages of this journey. Many of these products will only be fully realized in 10–15 years, if not longer.

While that’s frustrating for those of us who can’t wait to use them immediately, it has the great benefit of giving us time to ask ourselves the difficult questions about how they should be built. It gives Meta — and every company innovating in this environment — the space to invest in research and work in close collaboration with industry peers and experts on many of these important issues.

There are many challenges in ensuring the metaverse is designed to maximize opportunity for all. First, industry must come together around shared technical standards that allow the metaverse to be interoperable. Second, and significantly more difficult, is determining to what extent there are shared rules of behavior for users across the metaverse.

Given that the metaverse much more closely mimics physical life, with all its complexities and nuances, how should we think about where the line is drawn in terms of formal rules for what behavior is and isn’t allowed — whether enforced by government or industry? What tradeoffs exist in content-focused rules? How do we ensure they are not used to further stigmatize or surveil historically disadvantaged communities? At what level are these things best decided — platform-wide, or in individual communities? And given the technical challenges, what level of standards is realistically achievable?

By working together from this early stage across industry, the public sector, academia and civil society, I hope that we can begin to answer these questions as these new technologies are built, and ensure that the enthusiasm for the potential of these technologies is accompanied by a rigorous focus on developing them collaboratively and responsibly.

To that end, Meta has set out a number of priority areas that will guide our work:

• Economic opportunity — how we can give people more choice, and maintain a thriving digital economy.
• Privacy — how we can build meaningful transparency and control into our products.
• Safety and integrity — how we can help keep people safe on our platforms and give them tools to take action or get help if they see or experience something they’re not comfortable with.
• Equity and inclusion — how we can make sure these technologies are designed inclusively and in a way that’s accessible.

These priorities build on a set of Responsible Innovation Principles that Meta’s Reality Labs first set out in 2020 to underpin our product development work.

Meta will be working across the industry, and with experts from all sorts of different fields to develop these technologies, and to enable others to do so. In particular, we need to ensure that industry standards or regulations are inclusive of the concerns of the civil rights and human rights communities so these technologies are built in a way that’s empowering for everyone.

The World Economic Forum is taking a leadership role in this space by creating a multi-stakeholder network to inform future best practices and governance principles on key societal, ethical and governance challenges involving the metaverse. In particular, it will look into issues around equity, inclusion and accessibility, privacy and safety, economic opportunity and interoperability. This is similar in spirit to the work the WEF recently launched on quantum computing principles.

Many will understandably be skeptical about the idea that erstwhile competitors like Meta, Google, Microsoft and other tech firms, big and small, will really be prepared to work together in this way. But it is happening already. One forum for cross-industry co-operation is the XR Association, which brings together companies working across the whole spectrum of metaverse technologies — from headset manufacturers and technology platforms, to companies that build components, internet infrastructure, enterprise solutions and more.

Evidence of the XR Association’s commitment to grappling with some of the thorniest issues can be found in a new report, published last month in partnership with the think tank the Bipartisan Policy Center. As well as unpacking some of the serious concerns people have around issues like privacy, safety, inclusion, access and security, the report identifies a series of gaps in US law and public policy that will need to be addressed in the years ahead. These include policies around government-backed research and development, procurement and financing, workforce training, and digital infrastructure, and laws around privacy protections, civil rights, and tort and labor laws.

Meta has also made direct investments in external research and programs through its $50 million global XR Programs and Research Fund. This includes facilitating independent external research with Chuo University in Japan (on improving foreign language teaching and learning), Seoul National University and The University of Hong Kong (for research into safety, ethics and responsible design), the Centre for Technology, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & the Law at the National University of Singapore (on topics such as privacy and data use), and Australia’s Project Rockit (on young people’s perspectives of their relationships with AR and VR and how to create safer online social communities).

In Latin America, with C-Minds Eon Resilience Lab in Mexico (economic opportunities, privacy and security, safety and gender), Fundación Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina (ethical and Human Rights challenges in immersive technologies, with particular focus on safety & gender), Instituto de Tecnologia e Sociedade in Brazil (identifying and informing opportunities and challenges of metaverse innovation in Latin America) and The Institute for Research on Internet and Society in Brazil (on privacy and data protection in immersive technologies).

Through the fund, Meta has also invested in a number of initiatives with partners around the world, like the Organization of American States on job training and skills development for students, creators and small business owners, Women In Immersive Tech to support women and underrepresented groups in Europe’s VR, AR and MR sectors, and Africa No Filter, Electric South and Imisi3D to support creators who have been pushing the boundaries of digital storytelling using immersive technology through an initiative called Amplifying African Voices.

In the US, Meta is partnering with Jobs for the Future to demonstrate how AR/VR technologies can strengthen the competitiveness of small- and medium-sized businesses by upskilling workers, particularly those who have been disadvantaged in the labor market.

The intention of these sorts of initiatives is not to somehow spin away Meta’s own responsibilities. They are attempts to engage early and often with independent experts, academics and civil society on some of the areas where foundational work needs to take place in order to ensure these technologies are developed responsibly.

Nobody wants big tech companies to plow ahead without thought for the impact of their advances on society, nor do they want them to do all the thinking themselves behind closed doors. Initiatives like these are necessary but nowhere near sufficient. They are the first steps in a long journey that will only be effective when we all come together to agree on enforceable rules and industry-wide standards.

The metaverse is coming, one way or another. The future of the internet will be more human than the way we experience it today — more physical, interactive, and speech-based than flat screens filled with text and images.

It won’t be ownable, by Meta or anyone else, just as today’s internet isn’t. Meta has been upfront about the role it hopes to play in developing and establishing these new technologies, and how it is investing heavily to make them a reality. But it is being equally open about the manner in which it wants to go about developing them: collaboratively, transparently, and in full recognition of the social responsibilities inherent in the endeavor.

The metaverse will bring with it huge potential for social and economic progress. And it will bring risks and challenges, many of which can be anticipated. Our hope is that the lessons of previous technological advances can be learned, and that the rules, standards and norms that will govern the metaverse can be developed in tandem with the development of the technologies themselves.

This is a good thing — regulation is overdue. For too long, many of these important issues have been left to private companies to deal with alone. Facebook has advocated for this in a number of areas for some time now.

The stakes are high. These new rules will not only affect how we all use and experience the internet, they will have a profound impact on the digital economy. Even though Asia is home to very different political systems, one thing that is true almost everywhere is that digital technologies have driven growth and improved living standards.

From big corporations to coffee shops, bookshops and restaurants, reaching customers online is now central to how people in Asia do business. In 2019, analysis by Bain & Company, Google and Temasek found that Southeast Asia’s digital economy was worth more than $100 billion per year. Before COVID hit, it was on track to treble to over $300 billion by 2025.

This digitization of the economy has been accelerated by the pandemic as businesses have shifted online to reach customers. And data and digital tools will be vital for businesses as they rebuild in the months and years ahead. Regardless of the political differences across Asia, the digital economy will be at the heart of future economic growth.

New internet legislation has been passed or debated in countries across the region, from Korea and Japan to Singapore and Australia. As policymakers begin drafting laws, it’s increasingly clear there are competing visions of what the internet should be. And the consequences for the economy could be profound.

On one hand, there’s regulation based on a shared recognition that the digital economy will drive economic growth and living standards over the decades ahead, and a shared desire to create opportunity while limiting social disruption and harm. This approach is defined by principles of transparency, accountability, and the encouragement of innovation and entrepreneurship. As a company that believes fundamentally in the virtues of an open, accessible and global internet, we welcome this regulatory approach.

On the other hand, there are moves by governments to exert so-called ‘data sovereignty’ by building digital walls at their national borders, cutting their citizens off from elements of the global internet and threatening the free flow of data across borders. The temptation to exert national sovereignty over the internet is understandable, especially as nations elsewhere flex their digital muscles. But a lurch toward digital protectionism would be self-defeating for both individual countries and the wider region.

Digital frameworks defined by narrow national or political interests will stifle innovation, deter investment, and close countries off from the economic opportunities and social benefits of the open internet. They also risk undermining citizens’ rights.

The clear lesson from the success of Asia’s digital economy is that we should be tearing down walls across the region, not building new ones. The open, accessible and — crucially — global internet makes us greater than the sum of our parts. The ability to connect across borders, to buy and sell, collaborate and share, is the magical quality that makes the digital economy the incredible growth engine it has become.

If we want the new rules of the internet to preserve the benefits of the open internet while protecting against harm, where should we start?

First, to enable the digital economy to flourish, we need to keep the pipework of the internet open across the region. That means rejecting policies that would create regulatory silos and stem the flow of data across borders.

Second, to harness the benefits of a truly global internet, the more rules are designed to be complementary across the region the better. The global financial crisis demonstrated the need for regulatory harmonization and consistent standards. So we must collectively recognize the need for common principles and processes for international data sharing, allowing businesses to continue to offer cross-border services while providing consumers with better understanding of how their data is protected.

Third, to achieve all this, policymakers are going to have to work together in a spirit of shared endeavor. Multilateral agreement is difficult, but it’s not impossible. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s recent agreement on reforms to international tax laws is evidence of this. Governments across Asia already recognize that collaboration is the best approach to tackling cyber threats, and it’s the right approach for cyber opportunities too.

As the region rebuilds from the economic damage of the pandemic, which vision of the internet governments embrace will be a defining factor. I believe the winners will be those that resist the temptation to build new barriers and instead work with others to protect and enhance the open internet.

This op-ed was originally published on Nikkei Asia on 10 August 2021.

European policymakers have proposed the most comprehensive regulations for the internet ever. At stake are not just the parameters within which companies like Facebook operate in future, but the experience Europeans have when they open their phones or fire up their laptops, the competitiveness of European companies, and the potential for future Googles or Alibabas to emerge on European soil.

Getting this right matters. Europe’s new Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the recently proposed AI regulations, are a big deal for all European businesses and all businesses that operate here. Legislators estimate it might take a couple of years for the new laws to be finalized. What happens in the next two years will define the next 20 years.

And Europe is not alone. Governments around the world are putting forward proposals on everything from privacy and content, to how data can be held, shared and used at scale. This is a good thing. Many of these issues are too important to be left to private companies alone, which is why Facebook has been publicly advocating for regulation in a number of areas for some time now.

As policymakers start to draft laws, it’s increasingly clear there are contrasting visions of what the internet should be. In Europe, policymakers want to preserve an open, universally accessible internet, with safety and respect for human rights at its heart. Likewise, President Biden has called for a global alliance of “techno-democracies” to protect these values. Together, the US and EU could create the foundation for a wider global consensus. But we can’t take the open internet for granted.

The Chinese model — segregated from the rest of the internet and subject to extensive surveillance — presents a risk to the open internet as we know it. Other countries, including Vietnam, Russia and Turkey, have taken steps in a similar direction. In India, the world’s largest democracy, regulators have published rules that expand the government’s ability to direct social media platforms to trace and take down content, including private messages.

The push for greater transparency and accountability that motivates much of the proposed EU legislation is fundamentally right and welcome. It’s wise to seek to hold large platforms to account through things like greater data reporting and auditing of systems, rather than micromanaging individual pieces of content. It’s right that accountability should have teeth and there should be sanctions. And it’s reasonable to impose different and stricter obligations on larger platforms than smaller startups.

It’s in this spirit of transparency and accountability that Facebook has taken a number of significant steps already. We publish regular transparency reports showing how effective we are at identifying and removing violating content, and how often people see it. And we’ve appointed EY to audit these to ensure we’re not marking our own homework. We’ve also recently published detailed guidance on how our personalized recommendations work, and announced new measures to give people more insight into, and control over, how content is ranked in their News Feeds.

We’ve also created a number of mechanisms for sharing data that are in line with the requirements of the DMA and the DSA — from open source AI tools, and products like Facebook Business Suite to support businesses, to tools that share insights with researchers.

As they debate and amend legislation, policymakers need to avoid two unintended consequences: unnecessarily stifling European innovation; and inadvertently accelerating the splintering of the global internet.

Some of the DMA’s fine print suggests policymakers could find themselves deep in the weeds of product design — for example, there are detailed provisions for how users should log in to different apps — in a way which risks fossilizing how products work and preventing the constant iteration and experimentation that drives technological progress. And proposals designed to prevent big companies ‘self-preferencing’ by using their own services to close off markets are well-intentioned, but would benefit from a consumer benefit test to ensure they don’t shut out newcomers who would deliver cheaper and better services. Companies branching into new markets can be good for competition — look at Orange launching Orange Bank to compete with banks, or broadband companies offering TV services to compete with broadcasters.

While some areas of the DMA are overly-prescriptive, there are others where legislators could go further to promote a dynamic and evolving digital market and break down data silos — for example, guidance on how data could be shared safely between companies while respecting individual privacy.

As lawmakers around the world look for solutions at the same time, I hope they will learn from each other and avoid building regulatory silos, especially ones that prevent the flow of data across borders. Seamless data flows are the lifeblood of an open internet. But we’re already seeing signs of these siloes emerging. Recent European court rulings have thrown data transfers between the EU and US into doubt. And provisions in the proposed regulations allow for local laws that undermine the greater value of harmonizing rules across the EU — effectively allowing member states to create their own mini-DMAs and DSAs. Protecting our economies by ensuring the free flow of data between the EU and US should be an urgent priority on both sides of the Atlantic. It would be a shame if good intentions led unwittingly to the splintering of the internet.

To protect a truly global internet, the more rules are designed to be complementary at a global level the better. It’s vital that talks continue in the G7, in the OECD on digital taxation, in the new Transatlantic Trade Council, and in other international bodies.

It remains the case that the single biggest thing the EU could do to make its tech sector more competitive is complete the digital single market. The beauty of the European project has always been that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. But a startup in Madrid or Helsinki still has to navigate different intellectual property laws, licensing rules, and obstacles to the delivery of goods in order to sell across the EU, whereas a rival in the US or China can operate seamlessly across their domestic market.

A report last year found Europe produced more than a third of the world’s startups in the last decade, but only 14% of the so-called “unicorns” valued $1bn or more. Removing barriers within the Union will be better for Europe’s economy than erecting new ones.

Europe has long been a pioneer in internet regulation, but lags behind China and the US in building world beating global tech companies. As the EU creates its most ambitious digital legislation yet, it faces a choice: it can either fall behind the US and China for good, or it could create the conditions for European tech to thrive for years to come.

This op-ed was originally published in NRC Handelsblad on 30 May 2021.

Around the world, lawmakers are writing the new rules of the internet. In Europe, India, Australia, the UK and elsewhere, laws are being proposed governing everything from privacy and content, to the size and competitiveness of technology companies and how data is held, shared and used at scale.

This is a good thing — regulation is overdue. For too long, many of these important issues have been left to private companies to deal with alone. Far from resisting regulation, Facebook has advocated it in a number of areas for some time now.

President Biden has called for a global alliance of “techno-democracies,” but efforts to regulate tech in Washington have stalled. Much of the domestic debate is devoted to whether to break up big tech companies, but not on the fundamental societal issues at stake — like rules around privacy, safety, content, and data sharing — which can only be fixed by regulation.

This is a pivotal moment. As policymakers begin drafting laws, it’s increasingly clear there are contrasting visions of what the internet should be.

The open, accessible and global internet we use today has been shaped by American companies and American values like free expression, transparency, accountability and the encouragement of innovation and entrepreneurship. But these values can’t be taken for granted.

The Chinese internet model — segregated from the wider internet and subject to extensive surveillance — presents a risk to the open internet. Other countries, including Vietnam, Russia and Turkey, have taken steps in a similar direction.

Even in many open democratic societies, there is talk of “data sovereignty” and moves to clamp down on American companies and the sharing of data. Seamless data flows are the life blood of an open internet. But European court rulings have thrown data transfers between the E.U. and U.S. into doubt. Protecting our economies by ensuring the free flow of data between the E.U. and U.S. should be an urgent priority on both sides of the Atlantic. In India, the world’s largest democracy, regulators have published rules that expand the government’s ability to direct social media platforms to trace and take down content, including private messages.

The U.S. risks becoming a nation that exports incredible technologies, but fails to export its values. To make progress, we need to break the gridlock in DC. While there are substantial disagreements between Democrats and Republicans, no one wants the status quo and there’s much both sides agree on.

I’m an outsider to both Silicon Valley and Washington. My background is in British and European politics. As the Deputy Prime Minister in the U.K.’s first coalition government for generations, I led a naturally center-left party into a constructive governing arrangement with a center-right one. It worked because we focused on making progress on the things we agreed on.

Here are four areas where I believe progress could be made quickly with a bipartisan approach.

First, reform of Section 230. People of all political persuasions want large companies to take responsibility for combating illegal content and activity on their platforms. And when they remove harmful content, people want them to do so fairly and transparently. Congress could start there.

Platforms should only be granted continued protection from liability for the content they carry if they can demonstrate that they have robust practices for identifying illegal content and quickly removing it. While it would be impractical to hold them liable if a particular piece of content evades detection — there are billions of posts every day — they should be required to follow industry best practices. Congress could also bring more transparency, accountability, and oversight to the processes by which large internet companies make and enforce rules about what users can do or say on their services.

Second, Congress could do more to protect against influence operations. Companies can and do take steps to root out organized networks seeking to mislead people and undermine public trust. But Congress can create deterrence that no industry effort can match. Our teams have published recommended principles for regulation in this space, with a focus on imposing cost on the people behind these campaigns, and creating clarity on the boundary between deception and advocacy. Congress could act now to mandate platform transparency, enable lawful information sharing and impose liability directly on the people and organizations behind malicious influence operations. Congress could also update the rules around the use of social media in elections — rules which haven’t changed meaningfully to account for the internet era. For example, we’ve supported regulation like the Honest Ads Act and the Deter Act to prevent election interference.

Third, Congress can break the deadlock on federal privacy legislation. The U.S. is watching from the sidelines as others write the global playbook on privacy, with significant implications for American values, competitiveness and national security. But there’s much Democrats and Republicans agree on. By looking for a sensible middle ground Congress could make real progress, for example by establishing strong regulatory enforcement, and giving businesses certainty to operate.

Fourth, Congress should set out clear rules on data portability to better enable people to move their data between services and “vote with their feet.” It could also create rules to govern how platforms should share data for the public good. As society grapples with how to address misinformation, harmful content, and rising polarization, Facebook research could provide insights that help design evidence-based solutions. But to do that, there needs to be a clear regulatory framework for data research that preserves individual privacy.

Finally, to address these issues and more, the U.S. could create a new digital regulator. Not only would a new regulator be able to navigate the competing trade-offs in the digital space, it would be able to join the dots between issues like content, data, and economic impact — much like the Federal Communications Commission has successfully exercised regulatory oversight over telecoms and media.

By focusing on the areas where there is agreement on both sides, Congress can break the deadlock and create the most comprehensive internet legislation in a generation. In doing so, it can help to preserve the American values at the heart of the global internet.

This piece was originally published on CNBC.com on May 24, 2021.

In a recent article for The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance compared Facebook to a Doomsday Machine: “a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life.” In the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, the filmmakers imagine a digital control room where engineers press buttons and turn dials to manipulate a teenage boy through his smartphone. In her book Surveillance Capitalism, the Harvard social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff paints a picture of a world in which tech companies have constructed a massive system of surveillance that allows them to manipulate people’s attitudes, opinions and desires.

In each of these dystopian depictions, people are portrayed as powerless victims, robbed of their free will. Humans have become the playthings of manipulative algorithmic systems. But is this really true? Have the machines really taken over?

It is alleged that social media fuels polarization, exploits human weaknesses and insecurities, and creates echo chambers where everyone gets their own slice of reality, eroding the public sphere and the understanding of common facts. And, worse still, this is all done intentionally in a relentless pursuit of profit.

At the heart of many of the concerns is an assumption that in the relationship between human beings and complex automated systems, we are not the ones in control. Human agency has been eroded. Or, as Joanna Stern declared in the Wall Street Journal in January, we’ve “lost control of what we see, read — and even think — to the biggest social-media companies.”

Defenders of social media have often ignored or belittled these criticisms — hoping that the march of technology would sweep them aside, or viewing the criticisms as misguided. This is a mistake: Technology must serve society, not the other way around. Faced with opaque systems operated by wealthy global companies, it is hardly surprising that many assume the lack of transparency exists to serve the interests of technology elites and not users. In the long run, people are only going to feel comfortable with these algorithmic systems if they have more visibility into how they work and then have the ability to exercise more informed control over them.

Companies like Facebook need to be frank about how the relationship between you and their major algorithms really works. And they need to give you more control.

Some critics seem to think social media is a temporary mistake in the evolution of technology — and that once we’ve come to our collective senses, Facebook and other platforms will collapse and we’ll all revert to previous modes of communication. This is a profound misreading of the situation — as inaccurate as the December 2000 Daily Mail headline declaring the internet “may just be a passing fad.” Even if Facebook ceased to exist, social media won’t be — can’t be — uninvented. The human impulse to use the internet for social connection is profound.

Data-driven personalized services like social media have empowered people with the means to express themselves and to communicate with others on an unprecedented scale. And they have put tools into the hands of millions of small businesses around the world which were previously available only to the largest corporations. Personalized digital advertising not only allows billions of people to use social media for free, it is also more useful to consumers than untargeted, low-relevance advertising. Turning the clock back to some false sepia-tinted yesteryear — before personalized advertising, before algorithmic content ranking, before the grassroots freedoms of the internet challenged the powers that be — would forfeit so many benefits to society.

But that does not mean the concerns about how humans and algorithmic systems interact should be dismissed. There are clearly issues to be resolved and questions to be answered. The internet needs new rules — designed and agreed by democratically elected institutions — and technology companies need to make sure their products and practices are designed in a responsible way that takes into account their potential impact on society. That starts — but by no means ends — with putting people, not machines, more firmly in charge.

It Takes Two to Tango

Imagine you’re on your way home when you get a call from your partner. They tell you the fridge is empty and ask you to pick some things up on the way home. If you choose the ingredients, they’ll cook dinner. So you swing by the supermarket and fill a basket with a dozen items. Of course, you only choose things you’d be happy to eat — maybe you choose pasta but not rice, tomatoes but not mushrooms. When you get home, you unpack the bag in the kitchen and your partner gets on with the cooking — deciding what meal to make, which of the ingredients to use, and in what amounts. When you sit down at the table, the dinner in front of you is the product of a joint effort, your decisions at the grocery store and your partner’s in the kitchen.

The relationship between internet users and the algorithms that present them with personalized content is surprisingly similar. Of course, no analogy is perfect and it shouldn’t be taken literally. There are other people who do everything from producing the food to designing the packaging and arranging the supermarket shelves, all of whose actions impact the final meal.

But ultimately, content ranking is a dynamic partnership between people and algorithms. On Facebook, it takes two to tango.

In a recent speech, the Executive Vice President of the European Commission, Margrethe Vestager, compared social media to the movie The Truman Show. In it, Jim Carrey’s Truman has no agency. He is the unwitting star of a reality TV show, where his entire world is fabricated and manipulated by a television production company. But this comparison doesn’t do justice to users of social media. You are an active participant in the experience.

The personalized “world” of your News Feed is shaped heavily by your choices and actions. It is made up primarily of content from the friends and family you choose to connect to on the platform, the Pages you choose to follow, and the Groups you choose to join. Ranking is then the process of using algorithms to order that content.

This is the magic of social media, the thing that differentiates it from older forms of media. There is no editor dictating the frontpage headline millions will read on Facebook. Instead, there are billions of front pages, each personalized to our individual tastes and preferences, and each reflecting our unique network of friends, Pages, and Groups.

Personalization is at the heart of the internet’s evolution over the last two decades. From searching on Google, to shopping on Amazon, to watching films on Netflix, a key feature of the internet is that it allows for a rich feedback loop in which our preferences and behaviors shape the service that is provided to us. It means you get the most relevant information and therefore the most meaningful experience. Imagine if, instead of presenting recommendations based on things you’ve watched, Netflix simply listed the thousands upon thousands of movies and shows in order of those most watched. Where would you even start?

When you think of how you experience Facebook, what you probably think of first is what you see on your News Feed. This is essentially Facebook’s front page, personalized to you: the vertical display of text, images, and videos that you scroll down once you open the Facebook app on your phone or log into facebook.com on your computer. The average person has thousands of posts they potentially could see at any given time, so to help you find the content you’ll find most meaningful or relevant, we use a process called ranking, which orders the posts in your Feed, putting the things we think you will find most meaningful closest to the top. The idea is that this results in content from your best friend being placed high in your Feed, while content from an acquaintance you met several years ago will often be much lower down.

Every piece of content that could potentially feature — including the posts you haven’t seen from your friends, the Pages you follow, and Groups you joined — goes through the ranking process. Thousands of signals are assessed for these posts, like who posted it, when, whether it’s a photo, video or link, how popular it is on the platform, or the type of device you are using. From there, the algorithm uses these signals to predict how likely it is to be relevant and meaningful to you: for example, how likely you might be to “like” it or find that viewing it was worth your time. The goal is to make sure you see what you find most meaningful — not to keep you glued to your smartphone for hours on end. You can think about this sort of like a spam filter in your inbox: it helps filter out content you won’t find meaningful or relevant, and prioritizes content you will.

Before we credit “the algorithm” with too much independent judgment, it is of course the case that these systems are designed by people. It is Facebook’s decision makers who ultimately decide what content is acceptable on the platform. Facebook has detailed Community Standards, developed over many years, that prohibit harmful content — and invests heavily in developing ways of identifying it and acting on it quickly.

Of course, whether Facebook draws the line in the right place, or according to the right considerations, is a matter of legitimate public debate. And it is entirely reasonable to argue that private companies shouldn’t be making so many big decisions about what content is acceptable on their own. It would clearly be better if these decisions were made according to frameworks agreed by democratically accountable lawmakers. But in the absence of such laws, there are decisions that need to be made in real time.

Last year, Facebook established an Oversight Board to make the final call on some of these difficult decisions. It is an independent body and its decisions are binding — they can’t be overruled by Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else at Facebook. Indeed, at the time of writing the Board has already overturned a majority of Facebook’s decisions referred to it. The board itself is made up of experts and civic leaders from around the world with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives, and they began issuing judgments and recommendations earlier this year. The board is currently considering Facebook’s decision to indefinitely suspend former U.S. President Donald Trump in the wake of his inciting comments which contributed to the horrendous scenes at the Capitol.

Other types of problematic content are addressed more directly through the ranking process. For example, there are types of content that might not violate Facebook’s Community Standards but are still problematic because users say they don’t like them. For these, Facebook reduces their distribution, as it does for posts deemed false by one of the more than 80 independent fact checking organizations that evaluate Facebook content. In other words, how likely a post is to be relevant and meaningful to you acts as a positive in the ranking process, and indicators that the post may be problematic (but non-violating) act as a negative. The posts with the highest scores after that are placed closest to the top of your Feed.

This sifting and ranking process results in a News Feed that is unique to you, like a fingerprint. But of course, you don’t see the algorithm at work, and you have limited insight into why and how the content that appears was selected and what, if anything, you could do to alter it. And it is in this gap in understanding that assumptions, half-truths, and misrepresentations about how Facebook works can take root.

Where Does Facebook’s Incentive Lie?

Central to many of the charges by Facebook’s critics is the idea that its algorithmic systems actively encourage the sharing of sensational content and are designed to keep people scrolling endlessly. Of course, on a platform built around people sharing things they are interested in or moved by, content that provokes strong emotions is invariably going to be shared. At one level, the fact that people respond to sensational content isn’t new. As generations of newspaper sub-editors can attest, emotive language and arresting imagery grab people’s attention and engage them. It’s human nature. But Facebook’s systems are not designed to reward provocative content. In fact, key parts of those systems are designed to do just the opposite.

Facebook reduces the distribution of many types of content — meaning that content appears lower in your News Feed — because they are sensational, misleading, gratuitously solicit engagement, or are found to be false by our independent fact checking partners. For example, Facebook demotes clickbait (headlines that are misleading or exaggerated), highly sensational health claims (like those promoting “miracle cures”), and engagement bait (posts that explicitly seek to get users to engage with them).

Facebook’s approach goes beyond addressing sensational and misleading content post-by-post. When Pages and Groups repeatedly post some of these types of content to Facebook, like clickbait or misinformation, Facebook reduces the distribution of all the posts from those Pages and Groups. And where websites generate an extremely disproportionate amount of their traffic from Facebook relative to the rest of the internet, which can be indicative of a pattern of posting more sensational or spammy content, Facebook likewise demotes all the posts from the Pages run by those websites.

Facebook has also adjusted other aspects of its approach to ranking, including fundamental aspects, in ways that would be likely to devalue sensational content. Since the early days of the platform, the company has relied on explicit engagement metrics — whether people “liked,” commented on, or shared a post — to determine which posts they would find most relevant. But the use of those metrics has evolved and other signals Facebook considers have expanded.

In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his product teams would focus not only on serving people the most relevant content but also on helping them have more meaningful social interactions — primarily by promoting content from friends, family, and groups they are part of over content from Pages they follow. The effect was to change ranking such that explicit engagement metrics would still play a prominent role in filtering the posts likely to be most relevant to you, but now with an extra layer of assessing which of those potentially relevant posts was also likely to be meaningful to you. In doing this, he recognized explicitly that this shift would lead to people spending less time on Facebook because Pages — where media entities, sports teams, politicians, and celebrities among others tend to have a presence — generally post more engaging though less meaningful content than, say, your mum or dad. The prediction proved correct, as the change led to a decrease of 50 million hours’ worth of time spent on Facebook per day, and prompted a loss of billions of dollars in the company’s market cap.

This shift was part of an evolution of Facebook’s approach to ranking content. The company has since diversified its approach, finding new ways to determine what content people find most meaningful, including asking them directly and then incorporating those responses into the ranking process. For example, Facebook uses surveys to learn which posts people feel are worth their time and then prioritizes posts predicted to fit that bill. Surveys are also used to better understand how meaningful different friends, Pages, and Groups are to people, and ranking algorithms are updated based on the responses. This approach gives a more complete picture of the types of posts people find most meaningful, assessing their experience outside the immediate reaction, including the immediate pull of any sensational content.

Facebook is also in the relatively early stages of exploring whether and how to rank some important categories of content differently — like news, politics, or health — in order to make it easier to find posts that are valuable and informative. And last month it was announced that it is considering new steps to reduce the amount of political content — where sensationalism is no stranger — in News Feed in response to strong feedback from users that they want to see less of it overall. This follows Facebook’s recent decision to stop recommending civic and political groups in the US, which is now being expanded globally.

This evolution also applies to the Groups people join around shared interests or experiences. Facebook has taken significant steps to make these spaces safer, including restricting or removing members or groups that violate its Community Standards.

Facebook recognizes there are times when it is in the wider interest of society for authoritative information about topical issues to be prioritized in your News Feed. But just as messages from doctors telling us to eat our vegetables or dentists reminding us to floss will never be as engaging as celebrity gossip or political punditry, Facebook understands that it needs to supplement the ranking process to help more people find authoritative information. Last year, it did just that, helping people find accurate, up-to-date information around both Covid-19 and the U.S. elections. In both cases Facebook created information hubs with links and resources from official sources, and promoted these at the top of people’s News Feeds. Both had huge reach — more than 600 million people clicked through to credible sources of information about Covid-19 via Facebook and Instagram, and an estimated 4.5 million Americans were helped to register to vote.

The reality is, it’s not in Facebook’s interest — financially or reputationally — to continually turn up the temperature and push users towards ever more extreme content.

The company’s long-term growth will be best served if people continue to use its products for years to come. If it prioritized keeping you online an extra 10 or 20 minutes, but in doing so made you less likely to return in the future, it would be self-defeating. And bear in mind, the vast majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising. Advertisers don’t want their brands and products displayed next to extreme or hateful content — a point that many made explicitly last summer during a high-profile boycott by a number of household-name brands. Even though troubling content is a small proportion of the total (hate speech is viewed 7 or 8 times for every 10,000 views of content on Facebook), the protest showed that Facebook’s financial self-interest is to reduce it, and certainly not to encourage it or optimize for it.

Polarization

But even if you agree that Facebook’s incentives do not support the deliberate promotion of extreme content, there is nonetheless a widespread perception that political and social polarization, especially in the United States, has grown because of the influence of social media. This has been the subject of swathes of serious academic research in recent years — the results of which are in truth mixed, with many studies suggesting that social media is not the primary driver of polarization after all, and that evidence of the ‘filter bubble’ effect is thin at best.

Research from Stanford last year looked in depth at trends in nine countries over 40 years, and found that in some countries polarization was on the rise before Facebook even existed, and in others it has been decreasing while internet and Facebook use increased. Other credible recent studies have found that polarization in the United States has increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use the internet and social media, and data published in the EU suggests that levels of ideological polarization are similar whether you get your news from social media or elsewhere.

A Harvard study ahead of the 2020 U.S. election found that election-related disinformation was primarily driven by elite and mass-media, not least cable news, and suggested that social media played only a secondary role. And research from both Pew in 2019 and the Reuters Institute in 2017 showed that you’re likely to encounter a more diverse set of opinions and ideas using social media than if you only engage with other types of media.

An earlier Stanford study showed that deactivating Facebook for four weeks before the 2018 US elections reduced polarization on political issues but also led to a reduction of people’s news knowledge and attention to politics. However, it did not significantly lessen so-called “affective polarization,” which is a measure of someone’s negative feelings about the opposite party.

What evidence there is simply does not support the idea that social media, or the filter bubbles it supposedly creates, are the unambiguous driver of polarization that many assert. One thing we do know is that political content is only a small fraction of the content people consume on Facebook — our own analysis suggests that in the U.S. it is as little as 6%. Last year, Halloween had twice the increase in posting we saw on Election Day — and that’s despite the fact that Facebook prompted people at the top of their News Feed to post about voting.

How to Train Your Algorithm

Unlike the relationship between the couple cooking dinner — one shopping for ingredients, the other cooking — where both sides have a meaningful understanding of what they are putting in and getting out, the relationship between a user and an algorithm isn’t as transparent.

That needs to change. You should be able to better understand how the ranking algorithms work and why they make particular decisions, and you should have more control over the content that is shown to you. You should be able to talk back to the algorithm and consciously adjust or ignore the predictions it makes — to alter your personal algorithm in the cold light of day, through breathing spaces built into the design of the platform.

To better put this into practice, Facebook has launched a suite of product changes to help you more easily identify and engage with the friends and Pages you care most about. And it’s placing a new emphasis not just on creating such tools, but on ensuring that they’re easy to find and to use.

A new product called Favorites, which improves on the previous See First control, allows you to see the top friends and Pages that Facebook predicts are the most meaningful to you — and, importantly, you can adopt those suggestions or simply add other friends and Pages if you want. Posts from people or Pages that you manually select will then be boosted in your News Feed and marked with a star. Such posts will also populate a new Favorites feed, an alternative to the standard News Feed.

For some time, it has been possible to view your News Feed chronologically, so that the most recent posts appear highest up. This turns off algorithmic ranking, something that should be of comfort to those who mistrust Facebook’s algorithms playing a role in what they see. But this feature hasn’t always been easy to find. So Facebook is introducing a new “Feed Filter Bar” to make toggling between this Most Recent feed, the standard News Feed, and the new Favorites feed easier.

Similarly, for some time Facebook has tried to increase transparency around why a particular ad has appeared in your News Feed through the “Why Am I Seeing This?” tool, which you can see by clicking on the three dots in the top right corner of an ad. This was extended to most posts in your News Feed in 2019, and today it’s available for some suggested posts too, so you can better understand why those cookery videos or movie news articles keep appearing as you scroll.

These measures are part of a significant shift in the company’s thinking about how it gives people greater understanding of, and control over, how its algorithms rank content, and how it can at the same time utilize content ranking and distribution to ensure the platform has a positive impact on society as a whole.

Other measures coming this year include providing more transparency about how the distribution of problematic content is reduced; making it easier to understand what content is popular in News Feed; launching more surveys to better understand how people feel about the interactions they have on Facebook and transparently adjusting our ranking algorithms based on the results; publishing more of the signals and predictions that guide the News Feed ranking process; and connecting people with authoritative information in more areas where there is a clear societal benefit, like the climate science and racial justice hubs. More changes are planned over the course of the year.

Making Peace with the Machines

Putting more choices into the people’s hands is not a panacea for all the problems that can occur on an open social platform like Facebook. Many can and do choose sensational and polarizing content over alternatives.

Social media lets people discuss, share, and criticize freely and at scale, without the boundaries or mediation previously imposed by the gatekeepers of the traditional media industry. For hundreds of millions of people, it is the first time that they have been able to speak freely and be heard in this way, with no barrier to entry apart from an internet connection. People don’t just have a video camera in their pocket — with social media, they also have the means to distribute what they see.

This is a dramatic and historic democratization of speech. And like any democratizing force, it challenges existing power structures. Political and cultural elites are confronting a raucous online conversation that they can’t control, and many are understandably anxious about it.

Wherever possible, I believe that people should be able to choose for themselves, and that people can generally be trusted to know what is best for them. But I am also acutely conscious that we need collectively-agreed ground rules, both on social media platforms and in society at large, to reduce the likelihood that the choices exercised freely by individuals will lead to collective harms. Politics is in large part a conversation about how we define those ground rules in a way that enjoys the widest possible legitimacy, and the challenge that social media now faces is, for better or worse, inherently political.

Should a private company be intervening to shape the ideas that flow across its systems, above and beyond the prevention of serious harms like incitement to violence and harassment? If so, who should make that decision? Should it be determined by an independent group of experts? Should governments set out what kinds of conversation citizens are allowed to participate in? Is there a way in which a deeply polarized society like the U.S. could ever agree on what a healthy national conversation looks like? How do we account for the fact that the internet is borderless and speech rules will need to accommodate a multiplicity of cultural perspectives?

These are profound questions — and ones that shouldn’t be left to technology companies to answer on their own.

Promoting individual agency is the easy bit. Identifying content which is harmful and keeping it off the internet is challenging, but doable. But agreeing on what constitutes the collective good is very hard indeed. A case in point is the decision Facebook took to suspend former President Trump from the platform. Many welcomed the decision — indeed, many argued strongly that it was about time that Facebook and others took such decisive action. It is a decision that I absolutely believe was right. But it was also perhaps the most dramatic example of the power of technology in public discourse, and it has provoked legitimate questions about the balance of responsibility between private companies and public and political authorities.

Whether governments now choose to tighten the terms of online debate or private companies choose to do so themselves, we should remain wary of the conclusion that the answer to these dilemmas is always less speech. While we shouldn’t assume that perfect freedom leads to perfect outcomes, nor should we assume that extending freedom of speech will lead to a degradation of society. Implicit in the arguments made by many of social media’s critics is an assumption that people can’t be trusted with an extensive right to free speech; or that this freedom is an illusion and that their minds are really being controlled by the algorithm and the sinister intentions of its Big Tech masters.

Perhaps it is time to acknowledge it is not simply the fault of faceless machines? Consider, for example, the presence of bad and polarizing content on private messaging apps — iMessage, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp — used by billions of people around the world. None of those apps deploy content or ranking algorithms. It’s just humans talking to humans without any machine getting in the way. In many respects, it would be easier to blame everything on algorithms, but there are deeper and more complex societal forces at play. We need to look at ourselves in the mirror, and not wrap ourselves in the false comfort that we have simply been manipulated by machines all along.

The truth is machines have not taken over, but they are here to stay. We need to make our peace with them.

A better understanding of the relationship between the user and the algorithm is in everyone’s interest. People need to have confidence in the systems that are so integral to modern life. The internet needs new rules for the road that can command broad public consent. And tech companies need to know the parameters within which society is comfortable for them to operate, so that they have permission to continue to innovate. That starts with openness and transparency, and with giving you more control.