Meta: Facebook’s parent company has ordered its new project to be canceled

News JVTech Meta: Facebook’s parent company has ordered its new project to be canceled

Last February, we learned that Facebook’s parent company had new plans to lure users into its 3D virtual world, better known as Horizon World.

Since the Metaverse was made available, the platform was only accessible to persons over the age of 18. This is how Meta had shared his ambition to conquer a new audience: teenagers. According to the Wall Street Journal, the platform is intended to make the existing Metaverse accessible to users aged 13 to 17.

Just a month after this announcement, the project is in danger of being canceled or at least slowed down. In fact, two Democratic senators recently asked Meta to suspend plans to make its flagship virtual reality app accessible to teenagers.

Specifically, it was Senators Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut who sent a letter to the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. In their opinion, this new meta-project is “unacceptable” in its current form. Still categorically, they believe that “society’s record of failures in protecting children and young people” is in itself a reason not to launch this project.

Like other social networks, the Metaverse comes with many risks such as harassment, exposure to explicit content, etc. Especially since the technology is very new and it doesn’t yet have advanced management tools like parental controls.

In addition to these well-known aspects, the two senators shared their concerns about the possible impact of technology on the mental health of adolescents. They claimed that the few studies on the subject are already showing worrying results on the physical and mental health of young users after excessive VR use.

So far, Facebook’s parent company has not responded to the senators’ request. While this project should see the light of day this month, one wonders if Meta will pull it off.

More generally, this call for caution is related to platform restrictions. In fact, social networks are increasingly being encouraged to control or even limit the use of social networks by young audiences. This is particularly evident in the launch of more sophisticated parental controls and enforcement of one-hour screen time limits, as Tiktok recently announced.

In addition to its measures, the National Assembly in France is also dealing with the issue. She has also taken on the obligation of systematic age verification on social networks such as Tiktok or Snapchat.