In an effort to alleviate the stigma of an anti-conservative and bureaucratic bastion of content restrictions and incessant information hording, the world’s largest social networking is months away from launching the initial stages of alternating reality in the form of interactive 3-D applications.
Techcrunch shares that the daringly innovative move, will allow users to access and manipulate complex images through their newsfeed, the same controversial access point on the homepage where former employees admitted that they were told by the corporate brass to “bury” conservative news. The company later replaced the human editorial team with bots programmed with questionable algorithms that automatically obscure terms such as “firearms”, “republican”, and “christian”, and adopted strict policy pertaining to the content generated by groups, which basically gives free reign to ban or delete “offending” parties without explanation.
While the exciting news puts the social network on track for eventually building an interactive virtual reality world, the recent news cycle has not been so kind, as last Friday VP of advertising Rob Goldman authored a slew of tweets which claimed that the Russian hacking influence was focused on creating political divisiveness, rather than specifically endorsing Trump. Goldman’s claims, which were not endorsed by company, were in response to the Mueller report and applauded by President Trump. The report substantiates the prevalence of professional Russian trolls and the manipulation of social networking advertising platforms.
As accounts in the US continue to dwindle, as a result of fierce competition, and the pending controversies, Zuckerberg’s cash cow faces the inevitability of prolonged stagnation, unless there is a complete paradigm shift in the platform. Launching the base components of virtual reality may be the tonic that reinvigorates a widespread audience. On a superficial level, the prototypes of the technology are cool, but when weighed against the company’s persistence towards force feeding ideology and playing politics, the effort win back detractors may be in vain.
Read the Techcrunch story and check out the interactive 3-D prototype here.