Facebook
Presence is more important now than ever. Many around the globe are staying home and limiting their physical, social contact. Families and friends connect via Zoom calls or drive-by birthday parties. Professionals spend countless hours on screens talking with colleagues and clients. "Zoom fatigue" is a new saying among remote workers.
Spatial presence - the feeling of "being there" in a virtual space can unlock doors to social experiences and give people a sense of belonging and fulfillment in a world changed by a pandemic that keeps many physically apart.
The hours we spend on social media have also increased. A recent Statista survey showed that 29.7 percent of US social media users used social media 1-2 additional hours per day. eMarketer notes that 51% of US adults are using social media at higher rates during the pandemic.
Social virtual reality, or social VR, has seen an increase in users too. Social VR apps like Rec Room, BigScreen, VRChat, and AltSpace have all seen an increase in traffic. AltSpace is even hosting one of Burning Man's virtual worlds from this year's virtual event. This week, Facebook announced the launch of the public beta for its social VR experience, Horizon,
"I believe the next phase of social media is presence," says early beta Horizon content creator and social media consultant, Navah Berg. "Imagine a place where a brand can invite their brand ambassadors to try out a product without hopping on an airplane? A place a brand can launch a press release without writing a press release but actually being there and sharing the news with a community of journalists in a get together in social VR. There are so many opportunities for brands and content creators. I can't wait to see what happens next."
Berg adds that currently, in social media, people learn through shared passions and build relationships by relaying stories/content via a screen. For her, VR takes it to another dimension, where new friends and new memories converge through an immersive lens that feels as though they are in the same shared space while given tools to use together, before ever meeting IRL. Social VR allows you to learn and build meaningful relationships with your audience by being there creating together vs. watching from a screen in a flat 2D newsfeed.
Peeking Into A New Horizon
Navah Berg has been creating worlds inside Horizon and has become one of the top social VR voices.
Navah Berg
Sneak peeks of Horizon screenshots are flooding social media. Facebook dropped the gameplay trailer for Facebook Horizon after months of anticipation. The trailer shows avatars playing games in Horizon, building their own worlds, and having fun with other avatars. Facebook Horizon's beta access is currently invite-only.
Facebook has been one of the flagship companies for building VR headsets and promoting social virtual reality. The company bought Oculus in 2014, and since then, they've released a variety of headsets from the tethered Oculus Rift to the standalone Oculus Quest. For them, virtual reality isn't just another way to get people to use Facebook. They see it as the next computing platform that will "help people feel more present with each other, even when we're apart" – whether at work or at play.
Let’s Meet In Social VR
As the pandemic continues to affect our society and the way people socialize, social VR apps and experiences like Horizon can give people a place to gather, play, and create as they may have in real life. Social VR offers those types of interactions in one place - one where users are already connected to their friends who have a compatible VR device.
Facebook Horizon may create a shift in what "social media" means. Instead of consuming articles or reading friend's updates, Horizon offers a different type of online social interaction. Gameplay or world-building takes some of the strain out of being social that feeds creation.
Social VR & Marketing
So what do social VR and spatial presence have to do with the future of social media marketing? Well, everything.
Facebook defines virtual, social presence as "authentic and lifelike collaboration between people and colleagues in a virtual setting…" It's where anyone can manipulate objects, use their hands, and have a sense of touch. Avatars display the same expressions as their human counterparts. Spatial presence includes audio, where the closer you move to a noise the louder it gets. Horizon provides marketing opportunities in three areas: representation, play, and world-building.
Suddenly, relating to a target audience isn't through ads (text, image, or video). It's becoming part of a customer's world and presenting a brand or business as a real being they can interact with in a natural way. Facebook is demonstrating this in Horizon by deploying staff who will act as guides or hosts in public spaces. Facebook is suddenly changing the customer service experience from submitting a request to being able to virtually walk up and talk to a Facebook employee.
A Place To Play
One of the features of Horizon is playing games like mini golf, escape rooms, paint balloon, or a battlefield with a hybrid sword. Facebook wants Horizon to be collaborative and interactive. This gives brands a chance to get in on the action. Who wouldn't want to see Wendy's vs Burger King in a virtual paint ball fight - the winning team gets a free burger.
Building Virtual Worlds
Part of Horizon is world-building. Marketing in virtual reality takes a different approach in this new evolving space. Companies could build their own world for users to explore, hiding Easter Eggs (hidden items places in movies or games) for explorers to find leading to discount codes or free items. Companies could harness the excitement that Ready Player One brought to VR by building a world where one lucky winner could rule it for a day.
Creating a world for a brand within Horizon or branded virtual objects that Horizon users can reuse in their own designs are one way to take part in this new, social world. Instead of shooting a commercial in real life (which may be impacted due to the pandemic) brands could shoot one in Horizon, using real platform users as extras. The commercial (and making of it) could be livestreamed to Facebook and shared across platforms.
Is This Part Of The Future Of Social Media Marketing?
getty
Collaboration, gameplay, and world-building are all tools marketers need to get familiar with. Social presence in spatial computing will only get more advanced, especially as companies like Facebook ease the barrier to entry. Liam McKill, a Horizon beta world-builder said, "My biggest piece of advice for new creators in Horizon is to experiment constantly. You are in a world that can't be broken and is still relatively unexplored;"
Marketers should take that piece of advice to heart. Marketers would do well to experiment now, so they can be part of the virtual worlds like Horizon.
The future of communications is presence. The convergence of both the physical and virtual worlds will create new opportunities in the future in the way friends, families, and even colleagues connect. The future of connection will push the boundaries of today's technology, one virtual world at a time. The metaverse is coming, and it's a very big deal.
Censorship on social media? It's not what you think
Watch the new CBSN Originals documentary, "Speaking Frankly | Censorship," in the video player above. It premieres Sunday, August 30 at 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. ET on CBSN.
Musician Joy Villa's red carpet dresses at the past three years' Grammy Awards were embellished with pro-Trump messages that cemented her as an outspoken darling of the conservative movement. With over 500,000 followers across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, Villa refers to her social media community as her "Joy Tribe," and a few years ago she enlisted them to help wage a public battle against what she claimed was YouTube's attempt to censor her.
"I had released my 'Make America Great Again" music video on YouTube, and within a few hours it got taken down by YouTube," Villa told CBSN Originals. "I took it to the rest of my social media. I told my fans: 'Hey listen, YouTube is censoring me. This is unfair censorship.'"
Villa saw it as part of a pattern of social media companies trying to shut down conservative voices — an accusation that many other like-minded users, including President Trump himself, have leveled against Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter in recent years.
Joy Villa accuses social media platforms of anti-conservative bias. CBS News
But those who study the tech industry's practices say that deciding what content stays up, and what comes down, has nothing to do with "censorship." "There is this problem in the United States that when we talk about free speech, we often misunderstand it," said Henry Fernandez, co-chair of Change the Terms, a coalition of organizations that work to reduce hate online.
"The First Amendment is very specific: It protects all of us as Americans from the government limiting our speech," he explained. "And so when people talk about, 'Well, if I get kicked off of Facebook, that's an attack on my free speech or on my First Amendment right' — that's just not true. The companies have the ability to decide what speech they will allow. They're not the government."
A YouTube spokesperson said Villa's video wasn't flagged over something she said, but due to a privacy complaint. Villa disputed that, but once she blurred out the face of someone who didn't want to be seen in the video, YouTube put it back online, and her video remains visible on the platform today.
"At YouTube, we've always had policies that lay out what can and can't be posted. Our policies have no notion of political affiliation or party, and we enforce them consistently regardless of who the uploader is," said YouTube spokesperson Alex Joseph.
While Villa and others on the right have been vocal about their complaints, activists on the opposite side of the political spectrum say their online speech frequently ends up being quashed for reasons that have gotten far less attention.
Carolyn Wysinger, an activist who provided Facebook feedback and guidance about minority users' experience on the platform, told CBSN Originals that implicit bias is a problem that permeates content moderation decisions at most social media platforms.
"In the community standards, white men are a protected class, the same as a black trans woman is. The community standards does not take into account the homophobia, and the violence, and how all those things intersect. It takes all of them as individual things that need to be protected," said Wysinger.
The artificial intelligence tools that automate the process of moderating and enforcing community standards on the sites don't recognize the intent or background of those doing the posting.
For instance, Wysinger said, "I have been flagged for using imagery of lynching. ... I have been flagged for violent content when showing images about racism and about transphobia."
According to the platforms' recent transparency reports, from April to June 2020, nearly 95% of comments flagged as hate speech on Facebook were detected by AI; and on YouTube 99.2% of comments removed for violating Community Standards were flagged by AI.
"That means you're putting these community standards in place and you have these bots who are just looking for certain specific things. It's automated. It doesn't have the ability for nuanced decision-making in regards to this," said Wysinger.
Biases can be built into the algorithms by the programmers who designed them, even if it's unintentional.
"Unfortunately tech is made up of a homogenous group, mostly White and Asian males, and so what happens is the opinions, the experiences that go into this decision-making are reflective of a majority group. And so people from different backgrounds — Black, Latino, different religions, conservative, liberal — don't have the accurate representation that they would if these companies were more diverse," said Mark Luckie, a digital strategist who previously worked at Twitter, Reddit and Facebook.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he believes the platform "should enable as much expression as possible," and that social media companies "shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online."
Nonetheless, a recent Pew Research Center survey found that nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults believe social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints. In the last two years, two congressional hearings have focused on the question of tech censorship.
"We hear that there is an anti-conservative bias on the part of Facebook or other platforms because conservatives keep saying that," said Susan Benesch, executive director of the Dangerous Speech Project, an organization based in Washington D.C. that has advised Facebook, Twitter, Google and other internet companies on how to diminish harmful content online while protecting freedom of speech.
But she adds, "I would be surprised if that were the case in part because on most days the most popular, most visited groups on Facebook and pages on Facebook are very conservative ones."
She said she also finds it interesting that "many conservatives or ultra-conservatives complain that the platforms have a bias against them at the same time as Black Lives Matter activists feel that the platforms are disproportionately taking down their content."
A 2019 review of over 400 political pages on Facebook, conducted by the left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters, found conservative pages performed about equally as well as liberal ones.
But reliable data on the subject is scarce, and social media platforms are largely secretive about how they make decisions on content moderation.
Amid ongoing criticism, Facebook commissioned an independent review, headed by former Republican Senator Jon Kyl, to investigate accusations of anti-conservative bias. Kyl's 2019 report detailed recommendations to improve transparency, and Facebook agreed to create an oversight board for content removal decisions. Facebook said it "would continue to examine, and where necessary adjust, our own policies and practices in the future."
According to Fernandez, the focus should be on requiring tech companies to publicly reveal their moderation rules and tactics.
Benesch points out, "We have virtually zero oversight regarding take-down, so in truth content moderation is more complicated than just take it down or leave it up," referring to the fact that, to date, there has been little publicly available data provided by tech companies to allow an evaluation of the process.
"Protecting free expression while keeping people safe is a challenge that requires constant refinement and improvement. We work with external experts and affected communities around the world to develop our policies and have a global team dedicated to enforcing them," Facebook said in a statement.
And a statement from Twitter said, "Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules. In fact, from a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the service."
Meanwhile users like Wysinger struggle with mixed feelings about social media sites that promise connection but sometimes leave them out in the cold.
"Whether we like it or not, we are all on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter all day long, and when they take us off the banned list, I don't know anyone who doesn't post a status on Facebook right away, after the ban is lifted: 'I'm back y'all!'," said Wysinger.
"It's like an abusive relationship, you can't even leave the abusive relationship because you become so used to and dependent on it."
0 Comments:
Post a Comment