Meta just created a moderation nightmare for its smart glasses

Meta says it’s banning some content filmed with the company’s smart glasses from Instagram. Moderation gets messy very quickly.

Meta says it’s banning some content filmed with the company’s smart glasses from Instagram. Moderation gets messy very quickly.

Meta’s smart glasses have been a PR headache for the company. Public backlash has been swift, and fierce; people are concerned about the erosion of privacy and expansion of surveillance. Some especially bad actors are using the glasses to film themselves “pranking” random strangers . Women have become unsuspecting social media content for men filming themselves hitting on them without their knowledge. When your product is being referred to as “pervert glasses,” you have a problem on your hands.

On Thursday, Business Insider reported that Meta was taking the fairly extraordinary step of banning some content filmed with Meta glasses from the company’s own platform. Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently said that content “taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos,” would be removed from Instagram.

Appreciate for a moment the bind Meta finds itself in: Its product allowed customers to behave so objectionably that the company responded with a content ban, as if to say “Stop making us look bad.”

“We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform,” Mosseri said, according to Business Insider. “So we’re trying to fight that every way we can.”

But it’s worth considering how we got here in the first place. And a policy like this also creates a whole new set of questions that need to be untangled in order to understand what a ban on some smart glasses content actually means — and how it would be enforced.

We have little expectation of privacy in public spaces — you could become someone’s Instagram Reel subject just for walking down the street, taking the train, or shopping in a store. The rise of short-form video has given new life to the man-on-the-street content format, which has proven time and again to be cheap and endlessly repeatable; there are “creators” whose whole schtick is going up to strangers to ask how much money they make or how much they pay in rent, or whether they can name a song. Some people simply take videos of strangers minding their own business; others run up on people to compliment them profusely and enthusiastically just to get a confused — or gracious — reaction on camera. Being in public has always meant sharing space with other people, but now we must also anticipate becoming video fodder for people who will later monetize it online.