Mark Zuckerberg

Metaverse for youth: Meta urged to ban minors from virtual world

Currently allowing users from 18, Meta also wants to open up its metaverse app Horizon Worlds to users aged 13 to 17.

Advocacy organizations and safety groups have urged Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant Meta to halt plans to allow minors into the metaverse.

Online safety groups and experts sent a letter to the Meta CEO on April 14, calling out the firm to scrap its plans to invite teenagers and young adults to join its metaverse app, Horizon Worlds. The letter was signed by major safety groups, including Airplay, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Common Sense Media and others, according to a report by Bloomberg.

The activists argued that Meta must first assess the potential risks of allowing youth in the metaverse, as minors will likely face harassment and privacy violations on its virtual reality app.

“Meta must wait for more peer-reviewed research on the potential risks of the metaverse to be certain that children and teens would be safe,” the advocates wrote in the letter.

The statement referred to a March report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that found users under 18 have already been facing harassment from adults on the app. The study specifically witnessed 19 episodes of abuse directed at minors by adults, including sexual harassment, during 100 visits to the most popular worlds within Horizon Universe.

The safety experts argued that Meta should create a new path with its metaverse project to protect the youth, stating:

“Should Meta throw open the doors of these worlds to minors rather than pause to protect them, you would, yet again, demonstrate your company to be untrustworthy when it comes to safeguarding young people’s best interests.”

As previously reported, Meta started planning to open Horizon Worlds to users aged 13 to 17 in February. The company opened Horizon Worlds to users from 18 in 2021 but has struggled to keep users returning to the platform.

Related: France’s metaverse consultation seeks input on alternative to tech ‘giants’

According to Bloomberg, Meta currently doesn’t intend to abandon its plans for miners in the metaverse but is preparing to adopt some extra measures to protect such users from any metaverse-related violations, Meta’s Joe Osborne said.

“Before we make Horizon Worlds available to teens, we will have additional protections and tools in place to help provide age-appropriate experiences for them,” Osborne noted, adding:

“Quest headsets are for people 13+ and we encourage parents and caretakers to use our parental supervision tools, including managing access to apps, to help ensure safe experiences.”

The latest initiative to protect minors in virtual reality is not the first callout on Meta to reconsider its plans on allowing youth into the metaverse. Previously, Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumental demanded Meta to scrap plans to expand access to the app for teens aged 13 to 17 in a joint letter issued in early March.

Magazine: NFT Creator, Sarah Zucker: The Sarah Show’s analog past meets dizzying digital future

US lawmaker behind crypto mining legislation urges Zuck not to offer metaverse to teenagers

A letter from two U.S. senators cited reports of Instagram being behind many teenagers experiencing suicidal thoughts, and Meta’s failure to stop harmful ads aimed at young adults.

Two United States senators have penned a letter asking Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to halt a plan to allow young adults to access the firm’s metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds.

In a March 1 letter, Senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal said that Meta’s reported plan to “invite young users into a digital space rife with potential harms” should not be implemented if the strategy was driven by profit. According to the two lawmakers, allowing teenagers between 13 and 17 years old access to the virtual environment posed “serious risks”, citing privacy concerns, eye strain, and online bullying.

“Meta’s plan to target young people with offerings in the metaverse is particularly concerning in light of your consistent failures to protect young users,” Markey and Blumenthal said to Zuckerberg. “With a documented track record of failure to protect children and teens, Meta has lost parents’, pediatricians’, policymakers’, and the public’s trust.”

The two senators cited reports of Instagram being behind many teenagers experiencing suicidal thoughts, as well as the firm’s failure to stop ads for “tobacco, alcohol, and eating disorder content” targeted at young adults:

“As our constituents grow increasingly concerned about the effects of online platforms and social media apps on teens’ well-being, your plans to imminently pull these young people into an under-researched, potentially dangerous virtual realm with consequences for their physical and mental health is unacceptable.”

Related: Tech companies enter agreement for ‘Japan Metaverse Economic Zone’

Markey, a junior senator representing Massachusetts, has previously signed on to legislation targeting the environmental impact of crypto mining and called on mining firms to answer questions regarding data collection. Blumenthal was behind a bill in the last session of the U.S. Congress aimed at allowing third-party applications and app stores on devices released from major tech firms.

Meta ‘powering through’ with metaverse plans despite doubts — Zuckerberg

Billions of dollars have been poured into Meta’s virtual world with little return on investment, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he is holding fast.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still hopeful about the company’s metaverse plans regardless of the billions of dollars it’s sucking up from the company, claiming “someone has to build that.”

Appearing remotely for an interview at the Nov. 30 DealBook Summit in New York, Zuckerberg was asked his thoughts on whether the tech giant’s metaverse play was still viable given its cost and the doubts cast over the platform, answering:

“I think things look very different on a ten-year time horizon than the zone that we’re in for the next few years […] I’m still completely optimistic about all the things that we’ve been optimistic about.”

He added part of “seeing things through” in the longer term was “powering through” the doubts held about its ambitions.

Meta’s latest earnings, released on Oct. 26, revealed the largest-ever quarterly loss in its metaverse-building arm Reality Labs dating back to the fourth quarter of 2020. Zuckerberg’s virtual reality has cost $9.44 billion in 2022, closing in on the over $10 billion in losses recorded for 2021.

On the earnings call at the time Zuckerberg was unfazed by the cost, calling its metaverse the “next computing platform.” He doubled down on this claim at DealBook:

“We’re not going to be here in the 2030s communicating and using computing devices that are exactly the same as what we have today, and someone has to build that and invest in it and believe in it.”

However, Zuckerberg admitted that the plans have come at a cost, Meta had to lay off 11,000 employees on Nov. 9 and the CEO said it had “planned out massive investments,” including into hardware to support its metaverse.

He said the company “thought that the economy and the business were going to go in in a certain direction” based on positive indicators relating to e-commerce businesses during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. “Obviously it hasn’t turned out that way,” Zuckerberg added:

“Our kind of operational focus over the next few years is going to be on efficiency and discipline and rigor and kind of just operating in a much tighter environment.”

Despite the apparent focus from Meta to build its metaverse, Zuckerberg claimed 80% of company investments are funneled into its flagship social media platforms and will continue that way “for quite some time.”

Investments in Reality Labs are “less than 20%” at least “until the Metaverse becomes a larger thing” he said.

Related: The metaverse is happening without Meta’s permission

Of the 20% invested in Reality Labs, Zuckerberg said 40% of it goes toward its virtual reality (VR) headsets, with the other “half or more” building what he considers “the long-term most important form factor […] Normal-looking glasses that can put holograms in the world.”

Zuck takes bite at Apple

Zuckerberg also took a few jabs at its peer tech company Apple regarding its restrictive App Store policies, the likes of which have placed restrictions on crypto exchanges and nonfungible token (NFT) marketplaces, saying:

“I do think Apple has sort of singled themselves out as the only company that is trying to control unilaterally what apps get on a device and I don’t think that’s a sustainable or good place to be.”

He pointed to other computing platforms such as Windows and Android, which are not as restrictive and even allow other app markets and sideloading — the use of third-party software or apps.

He added its been Meta’s commitment to allow sideloading with its existing VR units and upcoming augmented reality (AR) units and hoped the future metaverse platforms were also open in such a manner.

“I do think it is it is problematic for one company to be able to control what kind of app experiences get on the device.”

Crypto Biz: Crypto’s day of reckoning has arrived

After lecturing us about crypto regulation, Sam Bankman-Fried’s house of cards collapsed this week as FTX declared bankruptcy.

Who would’ve thought that the implosion of Terra, the collapse of Three Arrows Capital and the bankruptcies of Celsius and Voyager wouldn’t be the most terrible crypto stories of 2022? In retrospect, crypto’s day of reckoning — and the new low for the cycle — hadn’t arrived even after all these tumultuous events. 

The industry’s cyclical execution occurred this week when FTX — the world’s second-largest crypto exchange — was feared to be insolvent and on the brink of collapse. Those fears stemmed from FTX’s incestuous relationship with Alameda Research, a trading firm founded by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried — As it turns out, FTX was trading on Alameda revenue to prop up its business, offering its illiquid and useless FTX Token (FTT) for Alameda’s Tether — Amid reports that FTX’s native token comprised roughly 40% of Alameda’s assets, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced that his exchange would liquidate its entire FTT stash. It was the same Zhao, also known as CZ, who offered to buy FTX a few days later to save it from imminent collapse. While Bankman-Fried agreed to the deal, credible rumors suggest that CZ is backing out because of a huge hole in FTX’s finances. (Those rumors have since been confirmed to be true.)

This week’s Crypto Biz newsletter isn’t for the faint of heart.

Breaking: Binance CEO announces intent to acquire FTX to ‘help cover the liquidity crunch’

After trying to quell rumors of FTX’s liquidity issues, Bankman-Fried announced on Nov. 8 that his firm had agreed to a Binance takeover — a move intended to ensure that all existing users would be made whole. “I know that there have been rumors in media of conflict between our two exchanges, however Binance has shown time and again that they are committed to a more decentralized global economy while working to improve industry relations with regulators,” Bankman-Fried tweeted. (It was later reported that CZ and Binance looked under the hood of FTX and didn’t like what they saw, so they’re backing out of the deal.)

Binance CEO shares ‘two big lessons’ after FTX’s liquidity crunch

Whether he likes to admit it or not, CZ played a major role in FTX’s collapse this week when he tweeted his intent to liquidate Binance’s FTT holdings. As the whole ordeal played out, CZ sounded off on “two big lessons” he learned from the FTX saga: “Never use a token you created as collateral” and “Don’t borrow if you run a crypto business.” He also confirmed that “Binance has never used BNB (BNB) for collateral, and we have never taken on debt.” Massive debt, poor asset management and highly risky trading practices have been common themes in this year’s crypto market mayhem.

Galaxy Digital discloses $77M exposure to FTX, $48M likely locked in withdrawals

As FTX began to unravel, it didn’t take long for businesses to step forward and acknowledge their exposure to the sinking crypto derivatives exchange. On Nov. 9, blockchain financial services company Galaxy Digital disclosed that its exposure to FTX was worth nearly $77 million consisting of cash and digital assets. The company also acknowledged that $48 million of that total was likely locked in withdrawals. Like many other collapsing exchanges and lenders, FTX announced that it was halting withdrawals to prevent a bank run while its FTT token was in freefall.

Meta joins big tech layoffs, lets go of 11,000 employees

If crypto news wasn’t bad enough, Facebook operator Meta announced this week that it would lay off roughly 13% of its staff, equivalent to 11,000 people. Like other big tech companies, Meta is hemorrhaging money due to soaring costs and a declining economy. Meta’s metaverse division, dubbed Reality Labs, lost $3.672 billion in the third quarter, raising serious doubts about its metaverse ambitions. Some of Meta’s shareholders are growing concerned that Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse experiment might not bear any fruit. The Zuck could dole out as much as $100 billion toward his metaverse business over the next ten years. Is that a gamble you’d make?

Crypto Biz is your weekly pulse of the business behind blockchain and crypto delivered directly to your inbox every Thursday.

Facebook became Meta one year ago: Here’s what it’s achieved

The company changed its name on Oct. 28, 2021, reflecting growing ambitions to transcend beyond social media and into Web3 and the metaverse.

It’s been just over a year since social media giant Facebook rebranded as Meta at the Facebook Connect conference on Oct. 28, 2021.

The name change reflected the company’s growing ambitions to transcend past social media and into the world of Web3, crypto, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and the metaverse — virtual worlds where consumers are likely to spend more of their time for both work and play.

The company has been busy.

In December 2021, Meta debuted its Horizon Worlds virtual reality social networking project, while it also opened up advertising for more crypto ads on Facebook.

In April 2022, reports emerged that the company has been considering a digital currency designed for use in the Metaverse internally, dubbed as Zuck Bucks, though no further updates on the project have been seen since.

In May, the company filed five trademark applications for a payments processing platform with support for cryptocurrencies and digital assets called Meta Pay.

In September 2022, the company announced that 2.9 billion users would have the ability to post the digital collectibles and NFTs they own across Facebook and Instagram across 100 countries by linking their wallets.

Meanwhile, on Oct. 11, Meta announced a partnership with tech giant Microsoft to bring a range of Microsoft Office 365 products into Meta’s virtual reality (VR) platform to try and coax other companies to work in virtual environments.

However, the year has not come without its challenges, particularly when it comes to the company’s metaverse ambitions. 

Last week, Altimeter Capital’s CEO and founder called Meta’s $10 billion to $15 billion a year investment into the metaverse as “super-sized and terrifying.”

Meta’s Q3 report appeared to only solidify these concerns, with the stock price falling 23.6% following its release, while Meta’s virtual reality research and development arm Reality Labs posted an accumulated loss of $9.44 billion so far this year.

Many may also remember Meta’s Eiffel Tower fiasco when an image of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s avatar standing in front of a virtual Eiffel Tower was mocked over lackluster visuals.

Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse avatar, which became an internet meme

Meanwhile, an Oct. 15 report from The Wall Street Journal suggested that the company has slashed its monthly active user goal for Horizon Worlds by more than half, suggesting the company’s flagship Metaverse was “falling short.”

This backlash was touched on by Zuckerberg during the Q3 earnings call on Oct. 26, noting that “we’re iterating out in the open” and that the social metaverse platform was still an “early version.”

“It’s a kind of a live early product platform, and that’s evolving quickly, but obviously has a long way to go before it’s going to be what we aspire for it to be,” said the CEO.

Related: FTX CEO dissects Mark Zuckerberg’s intent to pump $10B/year into Meta

Nevertheless, the technology giant is continuing to push forward with its foray into Web3 and other projects, including artificial intelligence, with Zuckerberg noting on the call that “we’re on the right track with these investments” and the company “should keep investing heavily in these areas.”

The company recently unveiled its latest virtual reality headset, the Meta Quest Pro during an Oct. 11 virtual event, along with the partnership with Microsoft and a new computer platform from Reality Labs.

“Work in the metaverse is a big theme for Quest Pro. There are 200 million people who get new PCs every year, mostly for work.”

“Our goal for the Quest Pro line over the next several years is to enable more and more of these people to get their work done in virtual and mixed reality, eventually even better than they could on PCs,” said Zuckerberg.

“Between the AI discovery engine, our ads and business messaging platforms, and our future vision for the metaverse, those are three of the areas that we’re very focused on,” he added.

Crypto Biz: Is Zuckerberg’s $100B metaverse experiment doomed to fail?

Meta’s Reality Labs division lost $3.672 billion in the third quarter. Some shareholders aren’t happy with the company’s oversized investment in metaverse technology.

Not everyone is convinced that Mark Zuckerberg’s massive metaverse experiment is a good idea. Since Facebook rebranded to Meta in 2021, the social media giant’s focus has increasingly shifted to connecting the digital and physical worlds through augmented reality. However, a shareholder of the company recently issued a letter to the CEO calling the metaverse investment “super-sized and terrifying.”

It didn’t take long for those concerns to be justified. Meta published its third-quarter financial results after the bell on Oct. 26 and, perhaps unsurprisingly, its metaverse division underperformed. Meta’s Reality Labs lost a whopping $3.672 billion during the quarter, mirroring a similar decline in Q1. That’s the risk you run when you venture into unchartered territory. For all the hype surrounding the metaverse, these new social worlds remain largely empty. Will Meta fill the void? Only time will tell.

This week’s Crypto Biz chronicles Meta’s metaverse experiment, Tesla’s Bitcoin (BTC) holdings and the sudden surge in Reddit’s nonfungible token (NFT) collection.

Tesla’s Bitcoin losses rise to $170M in the first 9 months of 2022

While Tesla’s foray into Bitcoin was initially praised by the crypto community, the whole ordeal has been a far bigger distraction for the electric vehicle maker. In the second quarter, Elon Musk’s company sold 75% of its remaining Bitcoin holdings, which added roughly $936 million to its balance sheet. By the end of Q3, Tesla’s remaining BTC was sitting at an unrealized loss of $170 million, according to a new disclosure filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The company’s net loss from BTC isn’t as bad, though, given that Tesla had realized $64 million in profits during its previous sale. Musk proved to have paper hands, after all.

CashApp adds support for Bitcoin Lightning Network

Cash App users will soon be able to send BTC to each other through the Lightning Network, the highly touted layer-2 payment protocol that’s supposed to make Bitcoin transactions faster and more scalable. To be clear, Cash App already supports Bitcoin transactions on Lightning in a limited capacity through QR codes. Now, the popular mobile app will give users the ability to send $999 worth of BTC every seven days. The catch is that the service is only available to residents of the United States, excluding New York. While estimates vary, Cash App is said to have roughly 80 million users. Imagine this demographic transacting regularly on Lightning one day.

Reddit NFT trading volume hits all-time high as wallet holders near 3 million

Crypto winter has been especially hard on NFTs — a once booming market whose trade volumes have plummeted over the past year. But, for social media platform Reddit, NFT interest appears to be surging. Data from Polygon and Dune Analytics revealed this week that the trading volume of Reddit’s NFT avatars eclipsed $1.5 million over a 24-hour period, bringing the collection’s cumulative volumes to $4.1 million. Since Reddit launched its collection in July, more than 2.9 million collectible avatars have been minted. You’re going to love the data breakdown in this story.

Zuckerberg’s $100B metaverse gamble is ‘super-sized and terrifying’ — Shareholder

Some of Meta’s own shareholders are growing weary of its metaverse gambit — and the colossal price tag behind it. Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner penned a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, urging that the company slash its annual metaverse investment budget from $10-$15 billion to $5 billion. He called the hyper-fixation on metaverse technology “super-sized and terrifying.” Altimeter Capital owns a 0.11% stake in Meta, so it’s unlikely that Zuckerberg will heed the warning. But, a $10 billion annual investment by Meta translates into $100 billion in 10 years on a concept that Gerstner says is far from proven.

Before you go: Why are Bitcoin whales accumulating?

Has Bitcoin reached its definitive bottom for this cycle or is there room for one final capitulation? This question has divided the Bitcoin community, which continues to anticipate a major breakout in the coming weeks. For dedicated hodlers, though, timing the bottom won’t matter in the long run. While retail was busy selling sub-$20,000 BTC, the whales have been quietly accumulating. In the latest episode of Market Report, Cointelegraph’s analysts discuss why Bitcoin whales have been stacking sats and what it could mean for the market in the short term. You can watch the full replay below.

Crypto Biz is your weekly pulse of the business behind blockchain and crypto delivered directly to your inbox every Thursday.

Metaverse losses top $3.6B for Meta with spending set to increase

The tech giant is just over $500 million away from topping its more than $10 billion metaverse department losses in 2021, but it said its spending will only grow next year.

Big Five technology player Meta is still burning cash through its metaverse research and development arm Reality Labs with a $3.67 billion loss posted for the third quarter of 2022, stating those losses will further deepen next year.

The company’s Q3 2022 earnings released on Oct. 26 show the biggest-ever quarterly losses for Reality Labs from earnings dating back to the fourth quarter of 2020, the business also made $285 million in revenue for the third quarter, its lowest on record within that time.

With its Reality Labs business marking its third straight quarterly loss totaling $9.44 billion so far in 2022, Meta is shaping up to beat its 2021 losses on its metaverse play which saw just over $10 billion in losses last year.

Those year-on-year losses are set to deepen as Meta chief financial officer Dave Whener stated in the earnings:

“We do anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year. Beyond 2023, we expect to pace Reality Labs investments such that we can achieve our goal of growing overall company operating income in the long run.”

On Meta’s earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg continued to be unfazed by the company’s big investment in what he called the “next computing platform.” He said it was the firm’s top priority and told investors that building a metaverse and its related hardware is “a massive undertaking.”

“It’s often going to take a few versions of each product before they become mainstream,” he added. “I think that our work here is going to be of historical importance and create the foundation for an entirely new way that we will interact with each other and blend technology into our lives as well as the foundation for the long term of our business.”

Overall the company slightly exceeded its revenue expectations from Wall Street analysts, bringing in $27.71 billion in revenue for the quarter but bought in $1.64 earnings per share, missing its estimate of $1.88 per share.

Meta’s stock price has fallen over 19.5% in after-hours trading at the time of writing, according to Yahoo Finance, with the company’s shares down over 61.5% since the start of 2022.

Related: Meta’s Web3 hopes face challenge of decentralization and market headwinds

Meta’s big bet on its virtual world has some investors urging the firm to scale back its investment, with Brad Gerstner, founder of technology investment firm Altimeter Capital and Meta shareholder penning an open letter to Zuckerberg and the board of directors.

Gerstner said its “investment in an unknown future is super-sized and terrifying” and that it could take a decade for its metaverse to start making a profit, he said the firm should focus on an artificial intelligence offering as it has the potential to better the company’s results.

Some are not optimistic about the future of the metaverse in the hands of Zuckerber. Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen, in April, said its virtual world will repeat “all the harms of Facebook” if the company doesn’t commit to transparency.

Facebook is on a quest to destroy the Metaverse and Web3

Mark Zuckerberg’s tech empire has a long history of using centralized systems to hurt users. Now it’s trying to join Web3.

The future of how we socialize online is being defined as we speak, and it’s far too important to leave things to the likes of Meta and other mega social companies. Just a surface-level look at Meta’s history is enough to understand its tendency to severely miss the mark. 

Some companies like to use Web3 principles to right the wrongs of Web2. And as a poster child for large, centralized organizations, Meta offers us some of the most useful examples of those wrongs.

Let’s touch on three times that Meta fell short of building the future of online social experiences.

It limited Open Graph

In 2010, Meta — still operating as Facebook at the time — released its “Open Graph” protocol, providing developers with a network of links between friends in order to encourage other people to take up its apps. It was a way for users to carry their Facebook identities from app to app, making it easy for developers to give those users a personalized experience. However, a few years later, the company shifted gears to become ruthless in cutting off friends, its newsfeed and other data access for developers.

The primary reason for this was to limit competition, as Facebook was worried about people reverse-engineering its social graphs and creating their own versions of Facebook. So, it ended up killing a product that many in the community nowadays call essential. It was ahead of its time — until it stopped making business sense.

Facebook felt that it was arming its competitors by giving them this data, and with its centralized power, Facebook had the unilateral ability to dramatically cut off this access.

It took the @Metaverse Instagram handle from the user who registered it

Online social identities are of great importance to users — they represent who you are and bear the weight of your effort and time spent online. So, when Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, getting a new logo and image, a situation with social media handles presented an unanticipated problem.

Related: Facebook and Twitter will soon be obsolete thanks to blockchain technology

An active Instagram user who had already registered @metaverse as her username was already regularly sharing photos from that handle. Then, without warning, Meta blocked her account. When that story came to light, it resulted in some predictably negative press for the social media giant.

Transparency and ownership are core values of the emergent decentralized paradigm. Social platforms of the future will be designed in such a way that abuse of power is either operationally impossible or super easy to identify. What’s yours will be yours, and no software or administrator will be able to change it manually.

Cambridge Analytica

In case you needed a reminder, Facebook spent much of the 2010s collecting the personal data of millions of its users on behalf of British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. That data was predominantly used for political advertising with user consent, and it was a defining scandal within the company’s history.

And despite being major news at the time, it doesn’t appear to have changed anything about how the company operates or how users could be protected. When NPR followed up on the story in 2021, it found that Facebook didn’t take responsibility for its behavior, nor did consumers see any reform as a result.

Related: Cryptocurrency is picking up as an instrument of tyranny

If anything, the company’s reckless actions only proved the need for an internet layer of self-sovereign identity and access controls. More and more people are waking up to the importance of identity on the internet, and that’s something blockchain is perfectly tailored to address. Meta’s history also provides a textbook example of surveillance capitalism, which should offend any internet user right to their core.

We’ve now surfaced three well-documented incidents demonstrating that older generations of mega social platforms and the data business model they represent can’t be trusted to bring about a mature ecosystem for the internet-using public.

Those mega platforms cast a long, dark shadow over social media overall, but the future of the space is bright. The crypto explosion over the past 10 years makes it clear that large, centralized entities don’t hold the same influence they used to.

What can we do about it?

The solution to Meta rests with all of us. The future of the internet is a collaborative effort of many different projects, developers and sovereignty-minded users.

The stage is set for small, nimble next-generation companies to radically redefine how people express their identity and interact with connections online. The smaller, committed teams will be focused on making an impact and building upon each other, as opposed to bolstering existing revenue.

These new companies have the opportunity to build the primitives for a decentralized society to emerge from the bottom up. They can create a standard and infrastructure for people to accrue and own their status and social capital, both within and across diverse social networks. They can build trust into the fabric of their social networks and enable truly meaningful connections and better discoverability. In doing so, they can create a more decentralized, open, resilient internet for everyone.

The events of older-generation firms also underline the importance of having a protocol for the internet that is owned by no one and can’t be centrally controlled. A protocol is needed to help coordinate these efforts, set standards for social data interoperability, provide a universal data storage solution that is both decentralized and economically scalable, and enable application builders to quickly tap into existing resources.

Such a protocol would be a powerful tool to fight back against the surveillance capitalism of companies like Meta. It would give users full control over their data and identity, and make it much harder for bad actors to abuse personal data.

Related: Nodes are going to dethrone tech giants — from Apple to Google

But this is no small feat. The next web is a huge undertaking that will require the commitment of many different people and organizations. It will be an unprecedented manifestation of human “scenius,” a concentrated and voluntarily orchestrated collective brilliance.

The good news is that the general ethos of the web may have fundamentally changed. Composability and interoperability are more than technical designs — they are also intrinsic value propositions we genuinely hold up to and share with others to work together. This is a demand that we must meet if we want to build a better future for the internet.

The consequences of inaction

Inaction is also a form of action. The consequences of not doing anything about the problems posed by Meta are clear. Your digital identity will never truly be yours and will always be at risk of being moderated, altered or even obliterated. Given that we are increasingly integrating our physical life with the digital, blurring the lines between the two and posting more personal and collective value in the digital, this danger looms darker and bigger.

In a larger picture, we’ll be sliding into a society of total surveillance capitalism, where not only will everyone lose control of their data and identity, but their data will be further commercialized to turn users into products who gradually lose sight of the problem and the will of action. A total system driven by profit diminishes the room for any discussions or endeavors regarding human agency and the meaningful social connections of human collectives.

We need to take action now to build a better future for the internet and human society at large. The next web provides us with an opportunity to do things differently, and we, together, must seize it.

Wilson Wei is the co-founder and CEO of CyberConnect, a decentralized social graph protocol that helps DApps bootstrap network effects and build personalized social experiences.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

US lawmakers call on Mark Zuckerberg to address ‘breeding ground’ for crypto scams: Report

A Federal Trade Commission report from June identified Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp among the top platforms for crypto fraud originating on social media.

A group of Democrats from the United States Senate has reportedly asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to provide details on the social media giant’s policies addressing cryptocurrency fraud.

According to a Friday report from the Washington Post, Senators Robert Menendez, Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, Dianne Feinstein, Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker called on Zuckerberg for the actions the company may take to detect crypto scams, to coordinate with law enforcement and to assist victims of fraud. Meta currently controls Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.

“Based on recent reports of scams on other social media platforms and apps, we are concerned that Meta provides a breeding ground for cryptocurrency fraud that causes significant harm to consumers,” reportedly said the group of senators.

The lawmakers cited a Federal Trade Commission report from June, which labeled social media and crypto a “combustible combination for fraud.” The commission reported that roughly half of the $1 billion worth of crypto-related scams in 2021 — the majority of which were focused on investments — originated from social media platforms:

“Nearly four out of every ten dollars reported lost to a fraud originating on social media was lost in crypto, far more than any other payment method. The top platforms identified in these reports were Instagram (32%), Facebook (26%), WhatsApp (9%) and Telegram (7%).”

In addition, the Democratic senators called on Meta to offer warnings a potential scams in languages other than English. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone reportedly said the social media firm invested “substantial resources to detect and prevent scams.” The lawmakers have requested Zuckerberg respond with detailed information by Oct. 24.

Related: 4 clever crypto scams to beware — Dubai OTC trader Amin Rad

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation similarly targeted crypto scams in a July notice, warning the public about apps using the same logos and identifying information as legitimate companies to commit fraud. Many unsuspecting users have also fallen prey to scams on Twitter and YouTube through hacked accounts, copycat websites and fake crypto projects and airdrops.

Insta-rally! FLOW token jumps 50% amid Instagram adoption euphoria

FLOW latest price rally has turned it into an “overbought” asset, which could amount to an imminent correction.

Flow (FLOW) logged its best daily performance on Aug.4 after becoming the latest blockchain to support Instagram’s nonfungible token (NFT) features.

Insta-made FLOW rally

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Aug. 4 that Instagram had expanded its NFT support to 100 more countries in Africa, the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and the Americas. As a result, more users can post digital collectibles minted on the Flow blockchain on Instagram.

The high-profile integration helped FLOW surge 54% to reach an intraday high of $2.83 a token. Interestingly, the token’s massive upside move accompanied a spike in its daily trading volumes, confirming some weight behind the bullish trend. 

FLOW/USD daily price chart. Source: TradingView

Like any blockchain native asset, the ups and downs in FLOW’s demand are tied to the adoption of its parent chain. In general, FLOW serves as a legal tender within the Flow’s proof-of-stake ecosystem for the following purposes:

  • Staking
  • Staking rewards
  • Transaction fees
  • Account storage deposits
  • Collateral for a stablecoin and DeFi products
  • Participation in protocol governance and ecosystem development

That explains the token’s bullish response to Instagram’s adoption.

Another 30% gains ahead?

From a technical perspective, FLOW eyes another 30% rally from its current price levels.

FLOW’s recent price trends appear to have painted a bullish pattern called the “Bump-and-Run-Reversal (BARR) bottom” on its daily chart. Now, the token has entered a breakout stage with its upside target near the level where the BARR bottom’s formation began at around $3.20.

FLOW/USD daily price chart featuring BARR setup. Source: TradingView

According to veteran analyst Tom Bulkowski, BARR patterns are “surprisingly good performers,” with a 76% chance of meeting its profit target. That raises FLOW’s potential to rise another 30% to $3.20, further supported by strong fundamentals.

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On the flip side, FLOW’s latest bull run has pushed its daily relative strength index (RSI) above 70, or overbought territory, which suggests heightened sell-off risks.

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