According to Meta, Facebook’s flagship social network is introducing features that will allow users to manage up to five profiles, a significant departure from the “real name” requirement the company has upheld since its inception.
Each user must maintain a single Facebook account, with their primary profile continuing to use their real name, per company policy. After logging into that account, users can access any additional profiles they make.
The modification gives users official permission to partially conceal their identities on the largest social network in the world, keeping up with features provided by rivals like TikTok and Twitter as well as Meta’s own photo and video app Instagram.Facebook
According to a statement from Meta, the product change would “help people tailor their experience based on interests and relationships,” such as posting different types of content intended for family versus friends.Facebook
According to Meta’s statement, all profiles will continue to be subject to its policies prohibiting impersonation and other forms of false identity representation.
A spokesperson for Meta said the business was testing the new strategy in a few nations, but she would not say which ones.
In order to promote the creation of industry standards that would make the businesses’ developing digital worlds compatible with one another, Meta, Microsoft, and other tech behemoths competing to build the emerging metaverse concept have formed a group.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as well as other well-known standards-setting organizations, are among the participants in the Metaverse Standards Forum, according to a statement released by the group on Tuesday announcing its formation.
Apple is conspicuously absent from the membership list at the moment, but analysts predict that once it releases a mixed reality headset this year or next, it will dominate the metaverse race.
Additionally absent from the forum’s attendees were the crypto-based metaverse platforms The Sandbox and Decentraland as well as the gaming companies Roblox and Niantic.
Apple has not yet publicly acknowledged its plans for a headset, but Bloomberg claims the company gave its board a sneak preview of the device. An inquiry for a comment regarding the new metaverse forum received no immediate response.
By releasing such a product, Apple would be in direct competition with Meta, a company that has pinned its future on the expansion of the metaverse and has made significant hardware investments to realise its vision of interconnected virtual worlds.
A mixed-reality headset with the codename “Cambria” will be released this year, according to Meta, formerly known as Facebook until it changed its name as part of its metaverse pivot last year.
In the past, Apple has contributed significantly to the development of web standards like HTML5. Apple collaborated with Pixar on the “USDZ” file format and with Adobe to make sure it was supported for three-dimensional media in the metaverse.
Any organization is welcome to join the group, including participants from the crypto world, according to Neil Trevett, an executive at chip maker Nvidia who is leading the Metaverse Standards Forum.
Without addressing how Apple’s absence would affect that objective, he said that the forum aims to facilitate communication between a variety of standards organizations and businesses to bring about “real-world interoperability” in the metaverse.
Following years of allegations that it ignored online abuses that stoked real-world violence in nations like India and Myanmar, Facebook owner Meta on Thursday published its first annual human rights report.
The report, which covers due diligence completed in 2020 and 2021, contains a summary of a contentious study on India’s human rights impact that Meta hired the legal team at Foley Hoag to complete.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two human rights organisations, have demanded the full release of the India assessment and have accused Meta of holding it up in a joint letter sent in January.
