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.
