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Researchers Have Warned About Harassment in the Metaverse for Decades
In typical fashion, Meta is choosing to ignore user safety while building virtual-reality worlds
The recent launch of Meta’s Metaverse happened nearly overnight, but its problems are decades old. When Facebook rebranded as Meta, it debuted an immersive virtual space called Horizon Worlds. Horizon enables Oculus users to be immersed in a virtual world to do whatever they were doing at work in real life, but now virtually, using poorly rendered, floating legless avatars. Almost immediately, harassment was reported in the digital space. Given all we know about Facebook’s care for user safety, this is unsurprising, but what’s shocking is that we’ve been thinking about virtual safety and behavior for three decades and Meta doesn’t seem to care.
30 years ago, the term for virtual reality was called “Cyberspace” (from William Gibson’s Neuromancer) rather than “Metaverse” (from Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash). At the time, dozens of engineers developed virtual products for people to inhabit while wearing headsets and using digital avatars. Writers, journalists, and researchers who studied VR were deeply concerned about the human body in virtual space, specifically about harassment and user experience.
Just recently, a woman recounted virtual sexual harassment she endured in Horizon Worlds to the New York Times after she had been groped online while she was wearing a haptic vest. Haptics are virtual feedback that vibrate when you encounter digital objects, and Zuckerberg intends on introducing full haptic bodysuits to Metaverse users in the future. The inappropriate virtual touch resulted in feedback on her physical body.
In addition, a researcher found that within the VRChat app, users (who often wear Oculus headsets) may encounter hundreds of “problematic incidents” over the course of a full-day session. The issue is exacerbated by the fact that children may also be sharing the virtual space with adults.
Meta knows that mental harm exists on their products. Facebook’s own research found that Instagram can cause teenage girls to struggle with their body image, resulting in increased anxiety. When Meta incorporates the rest of the body in an immersive…
