What a Greater Challenge Reveals
Recent events within traditional virtual reality and simulation spaces go specifically to these unregulated places, and therein reveal some disturbing trends that might be representative of the metaverse more generally.
The first among these is new reports that “assaults” are happening in the virtual space. Legal and illegal pornographic sites and chat rooms have long been a part of the Internet, and verbal abuse and harassment – and racialized aggression – have long been occurring on social media. It comes as no surprise, then, that concern for abuse also extends to the metaverse. According to a BBC News investigation, a researcher posing as a 13-year-old girl “visited virtual reality rooms where avatars were simulating sex.” The researcher was approached by “numerous adult men,” shown “sex toys and condoms” and witnessed “grooming, sexual material, racist insults and a rape threat in the virtual-reality world.”29
But things seem to have escalated even further when, on 1 December 2021, Nina Jane Patel, a beta tester of age 43, claimed that she was virtually “groped” on 26 November 2021 in the metaverse VR platform ‘Horizon Worlds’ made by Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. Patel claims that, “within 60 seconds of joining, she was verbally and sexually harassed by 3 to 4 male avatars, with male voices, where indecent pictures and abusive words were also involved.”30 Assaults are not new in the VR space: a 2018 study by virtual reality research agency The Extended Mind found that “36% of males and 49% of females who regularly used VR technologies reported having experienced sexual harassment.”31 It is, however, considered the first case of virtual assault on the platform.
In response to this, Meta has come up with a
new feature called ‘safety boundaries.’ As reported by Meta in a blog post, this will prevent the users’ virtual avatars from invading other avatars’ personal space. With the safety mode on, the virtual intruder’s hands will disappear if
the 1.5 meters boundary is crossed – a bizarre notion, in-and-of-itself. And it can't be very effective if the claims made by a reearcher for SumOfUs are true that – after the boundary was imposed – she was raped by a stranger as others passed around a bottle of vodka.32 So, the reality is: there are yet no legal constraints on behavior. And Meta’s response is simply a means to try and delay any.
Think about the consequences of what this portends.
As has been anticipated in this magazine in the past, when individuals prepare to engage with the increasingly digital and virtual world of the metaverse, as we create avatars and other things in much the same way we create other commodities, should we not ask ourselves whether they are subjects in their own right with rights or are they merely objects, dispossessed of rights, who are to be defined simply as our “property” or the “property” of others? In the former instance, avatars and other things would be beings who quite possibly possess agency, who might possibly
A reearcher for SumOfUs claimed, after Meta imposed it 1.5 meter 'safety boundary,' she was raped by a stranger as others passed around a bottle of vodka.
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