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In a three-hour chat with The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Zuckerberg detailed his company’s plans to release a new virtual reality headset in October. Zuckerberg said the upcoming headset will have “some big features,” including eye and face tracking, so that people’s VR avatars can accurately mimic their facial expressions and users feel as if their avatar is looking directly at the avatar to another person in VR social networking applications.
The company’s latest VR headset, the Quest 2, was released in October 2020. The publication of the Rogan interview comes a week after Zuckerberg was widely criticized online for the simplicity of his avatar in Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship social VR app. (Zuckerberg later admitted that the image he shared was “pretty basic.”)
Speaking with Rogan, Zuckerberg said more about the new headset will be revealed at Connect, Meta’s annual VR developer conference. The company hasn’t announced a date for this year’s conference yet, but it’s usually in the fall; last year it was broadcast online on October 28.
Zuckerberg doesn’t sit down for many traditional press interviews. Rogan’s podcast, while popular, has also come under fire for the host’s inaccurate claims about Covid-19 and vaccines.
In addition to discussing VR, Zuckerberg was also pressed about some of the company’s content moderation decisions. In one exchange, nearly two hours into the chat, Zuckerberg addressed his company’s decision to reduce distribution of a New York Post article published in October 2020 that made allegations about Hunter Biden.
Zuckerberg said the article’s circulation was reduced for several days while it was reviewed by the company’s fact-checking partners. “For, I think it was five or seven days when it was basically determining if it was false, the spread on Facebook was reduced, but people were still allowed to share it,” he said in the interview.
When Rogan was pressed on what the drop in distribution meant, Zuckerberg added, “Basically, the rankings and the Newsfeed were a little bit weaker, so fewer people saw it than they would have otherwise.” Zuckerberg said he didn’t know by what percentage. “off the top of my head” but said it “made sense”.
Zuckerberg said the decision to act on the story came after broader warnings from the FBI to be “vigilant” given Russian propaganda in the 2016 election.
“We just thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still consider a legitimate institution in this country, is a very professional law enforcement agency, if they come to us and tell us we need to be on the lookout for something then I’ll take it on seriously,” he said.
Facebook and Twitter took steps to limit the spread of the story on their platforms at the time. Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey later said his company made the “wrong” decision on the matter.
After fact-checkers looked into it, Zuckerberg said no one could definitively say the story was false. The situation is “nasty,” he said, “in the same way that you probably have to go through a criminal trial, but being innocent ends up being nasty.”
He added: “I think the process was quite reasonable. You know, we still allow people to share it, but obviously you don’t want those situations.”
In the conversation, Zuckerberg also touched on algorithms and content moderation, as well as lighter topics like his morning routine and his family’s love of jiu-jitsu. According to Zuckerberg, jiu-jitsu is “a big part of who I am.”
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