Social media platforms, which have had challenges maintaining a safe, socially conscious online environment — as the year’s spate of whistleblower disclosures and global regulatory hearings proves — may face an even tougher time maintaining civility in the metaverse. The shift from monitoring text, images and video to supervising a live 3D world will be orders of magnitude more complicated, observers say. According to a 2020 safety video for “Horizon Worlds,” a game Facebook developed for its virtual reality platform Oculus Quest, the company plans to record what happens in the metaverse, storing data that transpires in users’ VR headsets. Read more

Toshiba Corporation announced it will be breaking up into three independent companies by spinning off its energy and infrastructure business as well as its device and storage operations. The downsized Toshiba will continue to hold a 40.6 percent stake in Tokyo-based memory manufacturer Kioxia. The plan follows allegations of mismanagement and a five-month independent review of Toshiba that was in progress when company CEO Nobuaki Kurumatani resigned. Released Friday, the report says the former CEO behaved unethically but not illegally. Toshiba says the break-up is the best path to shareholder value. Read more

The premium service Twitter Blue is opening to users in the U.S. and New Zealand, after having launched this summer in Australia and Canada. The Blue program is available for $2.99 per month on iOS, Android and the web. Blue subscribers gain a range of features, including the ability to undo tweets within 30 seconds of posting, categorizing saved tweets into topical bookmark folders, using a reader mode for turning threads into easy-reading text, and adding a custom range of app icons. Additional features available only to iOS users include mobile color themes, a customizable navigation bar, and the ability to pin conversations. Read more

About 76 percent of adults believe Facebook makes U.S. society worse while 11 percent say the social network makes society better and 13 find it neutral, according to a new CNN poll by SSRS. Roughly 50 percent said they know someone who bought into a conspiracy theory they read about on the site. Meanwhile, Facebook parent Meta Platforms says that beginning January 19 it will discontinue advertisers’ ability to target users based on their history of accessing content about health, ethnicity, politics, religion, sexual orientation and myriad other topics. The change applies to Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. Read more

Game developer Zynga says it will launch the new HTML5-based game “Disco Loco 3D” exclusively on the social app TikTok. The single-player endless-runner game sees players collecting dance moves while avoiding obstacles as they walk down a catwalk, similar to Zynga’s “High Heels.” TikTok says the Zynga pairing aims to test its audience’s general interest for in-app games, and says it’s exploring opportunities with other game companies. Mobile games formatted in HTML5 are an economic way to reach a large audience of global users, including in emerging markets where low-memory devices on 2G and 3G networks are the norm.  Read more