The popular social media platform has kept the announcement under wraps, and the new name is still a closely guarded secret – but next week, users will no longer be logging on to Facebook as they currently know it. Details are still coming out, but the rebrand reportedly will put the social media site under a larger umbrella company which will also hold its other products (e.g., Instagram and WhatsApp).
American Family News spoke with Dan Gainor, vice president of Media Research Center's TechWatch. Gainor says Facebook is playing a very elaborate and expensive shell game.
"This is 'hide in plain sight," he begins. "[They know] the Left is gunning for them, [and] they want to make it look like they're doing something substantive and not really do anything substantive."
He points out the plan is being deployed at a time when they're under "a massive assault" from Congress and the media. "And then there's a whole treasure trove of documents that are floating out there somewhere that have been leaked," he adds.
Facebook, however, is offering a different reason. It says it wants to position itself to grab a slice of something called the "metaverse", a new and coming virtual world that could become almost as real as the actual. It is expected to be a three-dimensional VR (virtual reality) environment, shared by an unlimited number of users at once, where a clock continues even when an individual isn't there – but where real-world businesses exist that use real money.
While Gainor acknowledges that a whole new virtual world is on the horizon, he offers a warning: it will be controlled by the same liberals that birthed Facebook.
"If they build a new world, guess what won't apply in the new world: your freedoms," he states. "They'll build a new-world constitution where hate speech is banned. The metaverse will restrict your religion, because, 'Oh, [those] creepy religion people.'"
Facebook is going in big on the metaverse: it recently invested $50 million in funding programs and researchers to help build the metaverse products "responsibly," and predicts it will be 10-15 years before those products are realized.
