Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse, a network of virtual environments in which many people can interact with one another and digital objects, has me scared. As a researcher who studies the intersections of race, technology and democracy, I believe it is important to carefully consider the values being encoded into this next-generation internet.
Ensuring that this next iteration of the internet is inclusive will require that people from marginalized communities take the lead in shaping it. It will also require regulation with teeth to keep Big Tech accountable to the public interest. In 2016, ProPublica found that advertisers could exclude groups of people who see their ads based on the users’ race.
This option received a lot of pushback because Facebook does not ask its users their race. Facebook has since updated its ad targeting categories to no longer include “ethnic affinities”. But advertisers are still able to target people based on their presumed race through race proxies.
