The First Cases Of Sexual Harassments And Assaults Happening In The 'Metaverse'

17/12/2021

The internet allows interactions as well as engagements, both in a good way or a bad way.

The good thing is that, it allows people to communicate through the distance, halfway across the globe, in real time. As for the bad thing, the internet allows people to hide behind their screens, do malicious things, and get away with it.

This is possible because harassments and assaults done through the internet are limited to verbal, imagery or video.

Meta is formally-known as the social network giant Facebook.

After opening its "metaverse" platform Horizon Worlds to the public, the company hopes that users can feel and experience the digital world where virtual reality is blending the digital world and the real world. Through the Minecraft-like environment, users can interact with other avatars, as thousands flocked as beta testers to experience regular comedy shows, movie nights, and even meditation sessions.

And this time, even before the platform garnered enough traction or out of beta, users were already being sexually harassed and even assaulted.

Horizon Words' Plaza
Horizon Worlds has the Plaza where users can gather and meet.

According to one user in Facebook’s official Horizon group, as quoted by The Verge:

"Sexual harassment is no joke on the regular internet, but being in VR adds another layer that makes the event more intense. Not only was I groped last night, but there were other people there who supported this behavior which made me feel isolated in the Plaza."

Another case was experienced by Parmy Olson.

The columnist said that once when she was at the VR lobby of Horizon Venues, which is Meta’s VR events platform that is serving as Horizon Worlds’ precursor, she was surrounded by a "group of male avatars" who started taking pictures of her.

She said that:

"One by one, they began handing the photos to me. The experience was awkward and I felt a bit like a specimen."

She also noted that her conversations with other users were constantly disrupted by children shouting into their microphones, despite the fact that the VR platform should still be limited to users above 18 in the U.S. and Canada.

Later, at least one woman reported being "gang raped".

A woman in the UK wrote in a blog post on Medium that she experienced what no women should ever experience.

"Within 60 seconds of joining," Nina Jane Patel wrote, "I was verbally and sexually harassed – 3-4 male avatars, with male voices, essentially, but virtually gang raped my avatar.'”

With horror, she detailed how she watched her avatar get sexually assaulted by the handful of male avatars, who took photos and sent her comments like "don’t pretend you didn’t love it.”

The men groped her, gang-raped her, and took photos.

As she tried to get away, yelled — “don’t pretend you didn’t love it” and “go rub yourself off to the photo”.

To end the experience, she had to tear off her VR headset which covers her eyes.

"It was surreal. It was a nightmare," she said.

It's worth noting that the 43-year-old Nina Jane Patel was not just some ordinary users, as she was the co-founder and the VP of Metaverse Research.

Facebook the social media network has been struggling to contain numerous harassments and toxic contents its users are sharing.

The company tried to fix that, and avoid everything altogether, by rebranding to Meta.

After all, CEO Mark Zuckerberg once said that Facebook should no longer be considered a social media company, once it is a metaverse company.

The thing is, this metaverse that uses enhances user interactions and engagements, doesn't eliminate the fact that people are still way across the globe and can still harass and assault others.

Just like Facebook, users on Meta can easily interact with people they don't know.

But things can get worse on Horizon Worlds because the virtual environment is providing an extra dimension for people to harass and assault, and to be harassed and assaulted.

In other words, the metaverse that is essentially a VR app, doesn't allow users to "physically" assault others. But through the enhanced experience, it is allowing people to evade personal space to a whole new degree.

No longer are harassments and assaults on the internet is done verbally, through imagery or videos, as with VR, they can also done virtually.

Meta
Facebook rebranded to Meta, showing how big its ambition is in its pursuit of the metaverse.

Meta’s VP of Horizon, Vivek Sharma, called the situations users complained about "absolutely unfortunate."

"That’s good feedback still for us because I want to make [the Safe Zone feature] trivially easy and findable."

Rather than preventing users from doing those things, Meta is hoping to make the problem go away by making adjustments to its tools.

Meta said that users can always 'escape' this digital world by accessing the primary menu, where they use the safety button to instantly teleport them to a "Safe Zone," which is a private room where they can take a break or block, or mute, or report other people.

"We will continue to improve our UI and to better understand how people use our tools so that users are able to report things easily and reliably," added Meta spokesperson Kristina Milian. "Our goal is to make Horizon Worlds safe, and we are committed to doing that work."

It's worth noting that Horizon Worlds is Meta’s first attempt at releasing something that resembles Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse.

For this reason, the company is still probing the matter and is still experimenting on things to really understand the best solution.

But for a company that does have a long list of controversy, Meta’s approach isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring.