When Mark Zuckerberg described the Metaverse last year, he created an image of harmonious social connections in an immersive virtual world. But his company’s first iteration of the space hasn’t been very cohesive. Several women have reported incidents of harassment, including a beta tester who was virtually groped by a stranger and another who was virtually gang-raped within 60 seconds of entering Facebook’s Horizon Venues platform , as alleged. I had several uncomfortable moments in December with male strangers on a social app run by both Meta and Microsoft.
These are early days for the metaverse, but that’s the problem. If the protection is not baked early into its design, the line will be very difficult to secure. For example, gaming firms like Riot Games have faced an uphill battle trying to protect a virtual community from toxic behavior. Facebook knows this problem all too well: it struggled to put the proverbial toothpaste back in a tube with Covid vaccine misinformation uncovered by a whistleblower last year.
It turns out that Facebook has grappled internally with building security features into its new Metaverse services. In 2016, it released Oculus Rooms, an app where anyone with a headset can walk around a virtual apartment with friends and family. In 2017, it created the Oculus Venue (now Horizon Venue), a virtual venue where it would show movies or sports games in hopes that visitors would meet and bond. It was a big change, but also open to new risks.
The firm began holding meetings to discuss how they could design security features in the venues, recalls Jim Purbrick, a former engineering manager at Facebook involved with its VR efforts, which he designed the rooms in. didn’t have time. Managers focus on safety, he tells me. For example, people had to watch a security video before entering the venue. He says he warned engineers in advance that VR avatars would fade and disappear if they got too close to another user. He says he liked the idea, but it was never implemented. A Facebook spokesperson didn’t explain why the firm didn’t implement the fade-to-vanish feature, but instead highlighted its new ‘Personal Boundary’ tool, which blocks certain avatars from being within two virtual feet of you. .
Borderlands Tools may backfire, Purbrick says, pointing to how similar features have been abused in gaming. “You can ring with a gang of people around the others, making it difficult for them to get out,” he says. “If there’s a big crowd and you have a bunch of personal limitations, it makes navigation difficult.” Meta said that avatars will still be able to move forward with the Borderlands tool. “Oculus certainly cared about people having good experiences in VR and understood that a bad first experience could put people away from VR forever, but I think they underestimated the size of the problem,” Purbrick says.
He believes the meta should make it easier to find safety features, like fire extinguishers, and volunteers to monitor behavior. The gaming industry has a few templates for this type of governance. So far, Meta has centralized the task of moderating content on Facebook, but it will struggle with such an approach in a new virtual world.
The company has “the most centralized decision-making structure ever” for a large company, according to an early backer, a detail underscored by Zuckerberg’s control over 57% of the company’s voting shares. But virtual worlds are human communities at their core, which means people will want to have more say in the way they operate. Leaving some of that central control can help the meta reduce harassment.
It also has to educate visitors about what constitutes potential criminal behavior. Criminologist Holly Powell Jones has found that an alarming number of children and teens shy away from sharing harassment or pornographic images because they are not aware they are a criminal offense. People have already been “almost certainly” harassed on a criminal level in virtual reality, she says. “Harassment in the digital space is nothing new, and it’s something we and others in the industry have been working on for years,” a Meta spokeswoman said. ,
With police already pulled from social-media matters and the offline world, tech firms must try more radical solutions to address harassment in the metaverse before it’s too late. The lack of women in the development process for virtual reality is certainly not helping and can be fixed.
Microsoft last week announced a more drastic move to combat harassment: it was shutting down many of its social platforms, including Campfire, muting all attendees when they attended an event, and defaulting Activated as ‘Security Bubbles’. Meta should take cues from this. Otherwise his Metaverse dream may fade away.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.
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