Zuckerberg's plan to overcome Washington's aversion to metaverse

Mark Zuckerberg has a problem money can’t fix: convincing Capitol Hill that the metaverse — whatever that is — isn’t evil. His strategy is to start with a soft campaign to woo Washington insiders before deeply skeptical lawmakers begin to debate the controversial company's next act. This is a change of gears for a Silicon Valley behemoth whose early motto was to “move fast and break things” and that outspent all its peers to fend off legislation to curb the dominance of Big Tech.

A whistle-blower blasted the company and its founder at an October Senate hearing, decrying Zuckerberg’s outsized influence and calling for more regulation to stop the network giant putting profit above the public good. On the heels of that controversy, Facebook was rechristened Meta Platforms Inc., and its Washington team is already working to lay a favorable foundation for the push into this potentially lucrative landscape before lawmakers and regulators drill into what kind of harm it could cause.

Meta’s product and policy teams are introducing this future virtual world to think tanks and non-profits, according to people familiar with the discussions, holding conference calls in recent months to lay out its vision.

“There’s a lot of scrutiny on them, and they are trying to move into a new space and bring the temperature down at the same time,” said Neil Chilson, who has participated in Meta’s calls and is a senior fellow at Stand Together, a non-profit associated with industrialist Charles Koch.

For now, the effort is focused on outside groups, especially free market and libertarian-leaning organisations, many of which Meta supports financially. The calls centre on policy discussions, according to people who have participated, as the company tries to anticipate issues that could arise when users socialise, work, shop and play in new virtual worlds. It’s all part of a “soft push” to move past last year’s controversies, said Wayne Brough, a technology expert at R Street Institute, a free-market think tank.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed that the company is leading discussions about the metaverse, but declined to provide details.  A main goal is to ensure that features are “appropriate to the new technologies and effective in keeping people safe,” said a Meta spokesperson.

Today one of the few things shared by Democrats and Republicans is their unease over Facebook’s handling of misinformation, hate speech and protecting children online.

But Meta has found an ideological affinity with influential groups that lean conservative, and favour light regulation. It is still working to head off other challenges in US, including tech-focused anti-trust legislation. Some of the same think tanks that participated in the calls on the metaverse have also opposed those measures, echoing tech companies’ warnings of the impact on innovation, national security and popular consumer products. Meta lists the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance among its third-party partners, all of which have been in touch with the company about the metaverse. The R Street Institute has received funds for unrelated projects from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in the past, but isn’t currently supported by Meta. The financial support for think tanks and non-profits isn’t included in the more than $20 million Meta spent on lobbying last year.