Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse raises several questions. While he presented it with much fanfare, it’s still unclear if he’s going to work. That is why the Icelandic tourist office took advantage of this to put together a quite original campaign, where featured the Icelandverse. And it worked. Or, rather, managed to capture a very particular tourist: Zuckerberg himself.
The Icelandic government’s trolling of Facebook’s metaverse was very popular at the time and made a splash on social media. Released in November 2011, it featured Zack Mossbergsson, a parody of Mark in a black sweater and close-cropped haircut showcasing Iceland’s immersive open world environment, a world to connect to “without being super weird”
Zuckerberg picked up the gauntlet and chose Iceland as his new vacation destination with his wife Priscilla Chan.
There he posted a series of photos in the nordic landscapes of the country of the northern lightswith a text that laughs at the joke they made: “Strip from the Icelandverse”the owner of Meta wrote on Instagram.
How the Iceland campaign had been trolling the Facebook metaverse
The 2021 campaign, launched by the government at the time, invited people to “connect in a way that is not super weird” to an environment they called the “Icelandverse”. “It’s augmented reality, without wearing a half-dumb headset”continues the campaign, which in the background shows the incredible snowy landscapes of the country.
“It’s completely immersive, with real wet water, real humans,” the presentation continues to tease. Then show some of Iceland’s attractions, such as the northern lights, waterfalls or adventure tourism.
Trouble for Mark Zuckerberg in Washington
While enjoying the holidays, in the United States the owner of Meta faces legal trouble over Cambridge Analytica case. This past Monday, the Washington prosecutor, Karl Racine, sued him for deception and violation of a consumer protection law.
The decision is related to the Cambridge Analytica case, in which the consultancy used massive amounts of Facebook user data.
This is a second attempt to include the Facebook co-founder in the lawsuit related to Cambridge Analytica.
In March, a judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, the jurisdiction of the US capital, had rejected that the prosecution lcall Zuckerberg as a witness in the process started in 2018 and that has the social network at the center.
The consulting firm Cambridge Analytica is accused of having collected and used, without consent, the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, to whom the platform had given it access.
This data would have been used to develop software for direct the vote towards Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign.
For Racine, the president of Facebook “was aware of the risks” involved in handling the personal data of platform users to increase the company’s profits.
He went “straight facebook laxity manager regarding the application of its rules,” continued the prosecutor.