Le 1er April 2021, the show “Cash Investigation” revealed how alcoholics play the Evin law on social networks. In the light of this impunity and the dubious practices of powerful industrial groups on Facebook, Snapchat or even TikTok, it is frightening to imagine what they would be capable of in a virtual world.
Currently, we are struggling to stem the flow of illicit advertising on these networks, but what will happen tomorrow in virtual alternative universes such as the metaverse? A sometimes real future, much closer than we imagine, and which urgently requires legislation.
We all know that these social networks are the favorite terrain of young people, especially minors. Most were born with it, or when they were created, and so don’t even remember a world without it. The Covid-19 has only accentuated this phenomenon: we have all, the young generations on the front line, seen our freedom fly away while our society closed in on itself during confinement.
The metaverse, a connected system
So faced with an increasingly burdensome reality, the attraction of networks, screens, and finally a virtual world, has only grown. Of course, the notion of metaverse is not new. It was first conceptualized in the 1990s with Neal Stephenson’s famous book, The Virtual Samurai (Robert Laffont, 1996), then through various video games such as Second Life Where The Sims.
Nevertheless, the last evolution of the concept that caught our attention is that of Mark Zuckerberg at the end of 2021, when the Facebook group becomes Meta. The company then announced that it was concentrating on the metaverse, a form of parallel universe combining virtual and augmented reality, announced as the future of the Internet and therefore… of our society. And we all know that Mark Zuckerberg has the means of his ambitions.
By definition, the metaverse is presented as a connected system beyond the physical world that is accessible to everyone through 3D interactions. In this totally digital universe, users will therefore have the opportunity to meet, play, travel together or even party. A golden opportunity for lobbies, including the alcohol industry, in perpetual search for new ways to sponsor their products, even if it means breaking the law.
Brands of alcohol connected to the metaverse
All the more so as there is to date almost no regulation coming to frame the metaverse – how to legislate indeed on a concept which in essence is unreal? Without waiting for regulations to catch up with them, several alcohol brands have of course already taken up the concept.
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