Meta: how Mark Zuckerberg's company has responded to allegations of “sexual assault” in its virtual world

The metaverse is still in the concept stage, but the latest attempts to create virtual worlds are already facing an age-old problem: bullying.

The technology columnist of Bloomberg Parmy Olson told the BBC’s Tech Tent about her own “creepy” experiences.

And one woman compared her own traumatic experience in virtual reality with sexual abuse.

Meta, the company of Mark Zuckerberg, has now announced a new feature, Personal Boundary (in Spanish, “Personal limit”), which began to be implemented on the 4th of February and prevents avatars from coming within a certain distance, which creates more personal space for people and makes it easier to avoid these unwanted interactions.

This function ion prevents others from “invading your avatar’s personal space,” Meta said.

“If someone tries to enter your ‘personal limit’, the system will stop their forward movement when they reach the limit” .

It is available in Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues software from Meta.

The firm said it was a “powerful example of how virtual reality has the potential to help people interact comfortably”, but acknowledged that there is more work to be done.

For some, the news will be welcome.

Looks

“I had some moments where it was awkward for me as a woman,” Olson said of her VR interactions.

I was visiting Meta’s Horizon Worlds, her VR platform where anyone older than 000 years can create an av tie up and hang out.

To do so, users need one of Meta’s virtual reality headsets, and the space offers the ability to play and chat with other avatars, none of which have legs.

5 keys to understand the change from Facebook to Meta and the future of the metaverse

“I could see right away that I was the only woman, the only female avatar. And these men surrounded me and watched me in silence“, Olson told Tech Tent.

“Then they started taking pictures of me and giving them to me, and I had a moment when a guy came up to me and said something to me“, he continued.

“In virtual reality, if someone is close to you, then the voice sounds as if someone literally I was whispering in your ear. And it took me by surprise”, he added.

Olson experienced similar discomfort on Microsoft’s social virtual reality platform.

“I was talking to another woman and, A few minutes after we chatted, a guy came over and started talking to us and kept saying inappropriate things, and we had to block him,” she said.

“Since then I have heard of other women who have had similar experiences”, he maintained.

• The multi-million dollar purchase with which Microsoft gets into the race by the metaverse

The technology columnist indicated that although she would not describe it as harassment, it was “creepy and uncomfortable”.

Sexual abuse

Nina Jane Patel went much further days ago when she told the Daily Mail that she was abused at Horizon Venues, comparing she sexually assaulted him.

Patel described how a group of male avatars of her “touched” her and subjected her to a barrage of sexual advances. They photographed her and sent her a message that said: “Don’t pretend you didn’t love it”.

Meta responded to the newspaper saying she was sorry: “We want everyone to have a positive experience and easily find security tools that can help in a situation like this, and help us investigate and take action”.

Opportunities and threats from the metaverse

Moderate content in the nascent metaverse It will be a challenge, and the Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, admitted that it would offer “bigger opportunities and bigger threats.” physical space,” he said in an interview with the BBC late last year.

But he assured that people in virtual roles would have “a lot of more power” over their environments.

• Criticism of Mark Zuckerberg after the name change from Facebook to Goal

“If I had to silence you, you would cease to exist for me and your ability to make me damage would be nullified immediately,” he said.

Bosworth questioned whether people would want the kind of moderation that exists on platforms like Facebook when they have virtual reality chats.

“Do you really want the system or is someone listening to you? Probably not”, he wondered and answered at the same time.

“So I think we have a privacy trade-off: if you want to have a high degree of content, security or what we would call integrity, well, that is traded off with privacy.”

And in Meta’s view of the metaverse, where different rooms are run by different companies, the tradeoff becomes even more complex as people move of the virtual world controlled by Meta, to others.

“I cannot guarantee the privacy or integrity of that conversation”, He said.

Olson agreed that it was going to be “a very difficult thing for Facebook, Microsoft and others to fix”.

“When you’re scanning text for hate speech, it’s hard but it can be done; you can use machine learning algorithms,” he said.

“(Instead,) process visual information about an avatar or how close they are to each other, that’s going to be very computationally expensive, it’s going to consume a lot of computing power; I don’t know what technology can do that”, he reasoned.

The ethics of virtual worlds

Facebook is investing US$10.000 millions in their metaverse plans and part of that will have to continue building new ways to moderate content.

“We have learned a lot in the last 10 years of speech on the internet (…) so we’re going to bring all that knowledge to do the best we can to build these things from scratch, to give people a lot of control over their own experience,” Bosworth said. to the BBC.

---