Facebook's metaverse gamble
Tech Life
BBC
4.3 • 227 Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2022
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Facebook is losing users, will it's pivot to the metaverse pay off? Chris Fox speaks to Parmy Olson, technology columnist at Bloomberg about Facebook's parent company Meta, and the challenge of developing its own technology for the virtual world. Plus the co-chair of the Facebook Oversight Board Helle Thorning-Schmidt tells us why organisations like hers are helping Meta become more transparent in the way it moderates its platforms. And the BBC's Joe Tidy reports from Kazakhstan on the central Asian country's boom in Bitcoin mining, and the impact it's having on the environment.
(Photo: Meta headquarters in Silicon Valley, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On Radio 4, the more you listen, the more you see. |
| 0:04.7 | Hello, I'm Brian Cox. |
| 0:05.6 | And I'm Robin Ince, and this is The Infinite Monkey Cage. |
| 0:08.3 | In this series, we're going to have a planet off. |
| 0:10.8 | I feel like Jupiter wins. |
| 0:12.8 | And after all of that, we're just going to chill out a bit. |
| 0:15.9 | We're talking about your bog standard. |
| 0:17.8 | Ice, not the fancy one. |
| 0:20.1 | Science with funny bits. |
| 0:21.9 | The new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage. |
| 0:24.1 | Listen on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. |
| 0:31.7 | Hello, this is TechTent from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:34.9 | I'm Chris Fox, and on the show this week, we're asking why fewer people are using Facebook, remember that, |
| 0:40.8 | and whether the company can succeed in the metaverse. And we find out how the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan has become a giant in the world of Bitcoin mining. |
| 0:50.7 | Jane Wakefield is here with me this week. Jane, what have you been looking at? |
| 0:53.7 | Well, I've mainly been seeing how many wordal stories I can write this week, and the answer is two. |
| 1:00.4 | And I also did an interview with the ex-prime minister of Denmark. |
| 1:04.2 | I would accuse you of just playing games at work, but only one a day. So that's okay. |
| 1:09.1 | Here's a taste of what's coming up on the show. |
| 1:11.0 | The sound makes me excited because it's sound of money, digital money. |
| 1:15.3 | It needs to be better all the time. We're telling Facebook all the time to be more transparent. |
| 1:21.0 | Facebook can't buy its way into the Metaverse. |
... |
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