It took less than an hour for a researcher studying the super meta metaverse to “practically rapedAfter wearing a VR headset for the first time. After days of witnessing and experiencing rampant conspiracy theories, sexual harassment, racism and homophobia, the authors of a recent report said the tech giant is completely unprepared to fulfill its dream of creating an online shared space for millions of users.
The non-profit watchdog group SumOfUs was released his report Description of last week Meta née Facebook Moving from a company focused on social media to one that is trying to define what it means to be online in a pseudo-physical environment. The group also documented how, As Meta VRs It has grown to more than 300,000 users, leading metaverse producer Horizon Worlds actually hosts the worst kind of racist and misogynistic caricatures on the internet. SumOfUs included a link to a file video (Note, sexual assault warning warning) When users led a researcher into a room and proceeded to move their avatar torso back and forth in some sort of motion, all while another user tried to pass around a bottle of vodka.
SumOfUs are not shy about position against dead and its advocacy against big business on a host of other issues, but this report totally shares us Lots of evidence of how little moderation is in Horizon’s gameplay. It appears that the report’s researchers were wandering around different worlds in the Meta-owned product. There were examples of counterfeit drugs being placed on tables and users constantly calling each other racist and homophobic insults.
“Meta is moving forward in the Metaverse with no clear plan for how to reduce harmful content and behaviour, misinformation, and hate speech,” the report said. Not only do the company know that content moderation is a problem, they don’t have an exact plan for how to fix it. The report book was cited Internal note for the month of March Shared by the Financial Times and penned by Meta Vice President for VR Andrew Bosworth. The vice president of Meta VP said modifying users “at any scale is virtually impossible,” according to the FT.
The explicit promise of the metaverse is to occupy a digital world and interact with people as if you were really there. While online harassment is nothing new, explicit content of this type takes on a much more profound character once you wear glasses that are meant to make you feel like you’re in space.
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The watchdog group also pointed out several other examples where users with female avatars reported sexual assault, including one where a male user said he recorded a female player’s voice to “jerk off” to. Meta had already introduced a “Personal Boundaries” feature In February, this restricts other avatars from getting too close to another player’s body. Other virtual chat rooms such as VR Chat have already included similar features, but SumOfUs researcher avatars have been constantly asked to remove personal limits settings. When another user attempts to touch you or interact with you, the VR controllers vibrate “creating a very confusing and even disturbing physical experience during a virtual attack,” according to the report.
A Meta spokesperson told Insider that the personal limits setting is turned on by default, and doesn’t recommend turning it off when strangers are around, adding, “We want everyone who uses our products to have a good experience and easily find tools that can help in situations like this, so we can investigation and action.”
Although Horizon Worlds allows parental controls as well as the ability to mute other users, the platform remains a major problem for many young users, especially since researchers have seen other avatars encouraging people to remove security features. The app is almost 18 years old, but existing users said that the platform is already full of underage people. Unlike social media platforms that can use systems to monitor written content or even videos, current virtual reality chat rooms rely on individual users to report bad behavior.
Current self-designed “metaverses” like the child-centered game Roblox have shown how difficult it can be to curb player bad behavior. There were previous examples of avatars Sexual assault of other players up to the age of seven. Horizon Worlds is supposed to include in-game moderators to enforce the guidelines, but the report says that in interviews players have said there aren’t nearly enough of them. And it’s not just a problem for the Meta platform. VR Chat Hosted Annoying Content on the podium young children Those who know how to falsify the date of birth can reach it easily.
The report’s authors aren’t the only ones rocking Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, specifically for the kind of product they’re trying to build. Amazon hardware head Recently noticed how no one can determine what a “metaverse” actually is. Evan Spiegel, Snap CEO, described the technology as “virtualFrom anything. The former CEO of Nintendo of America Reggie-Fils-Aimé said that the Meta is “Not an innovative company‘, adding that the self-designed metaverse pioneer hasn’t shown that he knows how to drive innovation.
But more than tech executives throwing slaps at the competition, the comments indicate how much ambiguity remains about the idea of a shared digital space. Nick Clegg, Head of Global Affairs at Meta, wrote recently Asking the Meta to record a player’s speech in order to edit the content would be like asking the bar manager to listen to conversations and silencing things they don’t like. Instead, the company wants to focus on AI-driven systems that help respond to user reports.
“We are in the first phase of this journey,” Clegg wrote.
But the highly critical writers at SumOfUs basically said that if anyone is going to command the metaverse, it better not be Meta.
“dead It’s shown time and time again that it’s unable to monitor and respond to malicious content appropriately on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — so it’s no surprise that it has already failed on the Metaverse as well, the SumOfUs authors said.
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