Ms Frances Haugen:

I am always happy to meet governmental officials who want to hold the public safe. I would be happy to deal with the commissioner. On the question of keeping the metaverse safe, it is a great illustration of why we must focus on our systems-based approach rather than the current harm assessments. The metaverse is new and if we sat down to write a protection plan today, we would know very little about the metaverse.

I will lay out what will happen if we do not implement some recurrent system of mandatory risk assessment. We will see exactly the same thing happen with the metaverse - or perhaps even worse things - that we have already seen on places like Instagram. People have been complaining about many of the issues in my disclosures for years, or even a decade. The only thing that changed was that I brought forward proof that Facebook knew about these harms and they were real. Facebook, for as long as ten years, had been saying that these problems were anecdotal and it was not the way it actually is. It argued that if people could see everything, they would see such complaints are not borne out in reality. They were real and the company was just lying to us.

What we will see with the metaverse is that people will start having individual problems. Paediatricians are an example. Kids are getting more addicted to these immersive systems than they have been even to Instagram. We are not going to be able to prove such an issue because we will all only see our individual experiences of things like the metaverse. We will not be able to see the systematic attacks because only Facebook will get to see behind the curtain. That is why we need mandatory risk assessments or we will have the same arguments and the company will say the issues are anecdotal and not real. The company holds all the power.