By now, you've likely read about the disastrous Ron DeSantis campaign announcement on Twitter last night; what was supposed to be a virtual rally to launch a presidential run turned into something that reminded me of those first dark weeks of lockdown, when no one quite knew how to use Zoom. Widely mocked and considered a fail (whale), it did seem to highlight the challenges platforms have when it comes to running events at scale.
But beyond that, it does seem like the era of politicians dominating social media might be drawing to a close. While the 2024 election cycle might not have many metaverse activations, subsequent elections will -- and that raises a whole host of issues we need to prepare for right now.
The first is that of scale; while we can mock Twitter all we want, we've also seen some metaverse platforms collapse under the weight of too many users. If any platform is going to host an event with a big ticket candidate, they need to make sure their servers can handle it; otherwise, the failure becomes the story.
The basics are one thing -- but how can we verify information and identity in the metaverse? Right now, anyone could create an avatar of a political candidate and program them with an AI to sound like that person, and let them roam around the metaverse. Moving forward, we need strong verification systems to make sure people are who they say they are in this new world. We've seen how the death of verification and credentials brought down web2 social media networks, and need to make sure that doesn't happen again.
Misinformation is trickier. While it might be hard for someone to create a candidate avatar out of whole cloth, it will be increasingly easy to create deep fake video and audio clips and share those. Audio in particular is hard to regulate -- the metaverse is real time and ephemeral, and word travels fast. It will be a constant struggle to protect free speech while also making sure that abuse, hate speech, and misinformation are not tolerated. But here, AI can play a role, by listening for keywords, quickly determining is something falls within the bounds of protected speech, and muting accordingly.
Outside the metaverse, we need to focus on media literacy and looking out for signs that something is a fraud or misinformation. We can build all the guardrails we want in virtual worlds, but unless the people embodying those avatars know how to spot a lie, we're likely going to be dealing with the same issues we are facing right now.