Hi everybody. Thank you for
Coming to my talk today. My name is Nazanin Sabri and I'm a PhD student at the University of
California San Diego. I will be presenting our work challenges of moderating social virtual
reality, which is a project that I completed with the help of my co-authors, Bella Chen,
Annabelle Teoh, Steven Dow, Kristen Vaccaro and Mai ElSherief.
Social VR are platforms that allow users to interact in real time through voice and gestures. These spaces can be
Used to casually spend time with friends, play games, attend performances or interviews,
or even have discussions or religious gatherings.
While these platforms can be similar to other social medias. They have fundamental differences
that could affect user behavior, platform governance, and content moderation. For instance,
users can now use voice and gestures to interact with one another, where previously they might
have only been able to use text or images. Additionally, the spatial dimensions of VR
make it such that you are only able to hear people who are close to you, and finally,
the content is ephemeral as interactions are not being recorded. So these differences bring
up two questions. What new harmful behaviors has social we are enabled, and how have moderators
responded? While there's a lot of work on content moderation, they have mostly focused
on post based platforms where the moderation pipeline relies on the existence of a clear
record of user behavior. So to answer our questions, we conduct two studies, a virtual
ethnography and interviews with moderators.
For our observations, we focus on three social VR platforms, Horizon Worlds Rec Room, and
AltspaceVR. In our first study, we conduct 100 observations focusing on public spaces
with high participant counts and prioritizing spaces that had not been visited before. Observations
were conducted by three members of our team. We stayed in each space for 30 minutes or
until we observed the harmful behavior and the response to it if there was any. This
table shows high level statistics of our observations. Harmful behaviors were observed in 45% of
events and moderators were present in 51% of events were harms occurred. However, they
did not always address the issue. This might have been because they did not see or hear
what was happening due to the spatial constraints of social vr. In total, we were able to identify
13 types of harm enabled by voice, virtual embodiment, and platform affordances.
I will briefly go over a couple of examples, but you can find more details for all of these
harms in our paper. Enactments of physical harm was one example we observed that was
enabled by virtual embodiment. As shown in the image, an adult male looking and sounding
avatar was threatening to beat avatars that sounded like children with a stick. We later
heard the child sounding avatar asking the person to stop beating her friend. Group acts
of bullying is another example. While group harassment or bullying is an issue that is
observed in other social media as well, the immersive nature of VR and the feeling of
being surrounded by people such as the example shown in this image could potentially exacerbate
the effects of group bullying. Another example of harm we observed was the distribution of
pornographic content. Again, this is an issue in other social media as well.
However, here, users are able to transform the pornographic content into an object such
as a Polaroid image that they can later hide or destroy if a moderator walks in or only
show the item to specific people in the space that they want to share it with. During our
observation, we also paid attention to how moderators respond to harms. Moderation practices
fit into three groups which follow the grouping identified in prior work. These include preemptive
responses such as informing the users of the rules by writing them on objects in the space
or as popups when the user joins. A world. Facilitatory responses included greeting people
at the spawn point and explaining the goals of the event to them. Finally, moderators
also use punitive responses such as muting or removal, aiming to punish the user after
a harm has occurred. To gain insights into how moderators work.
We also conducted 11 interviews with AltspaceVR moderators. We'll briefly discuss some
of our findings. You can refer to the paper for more details. Firstly, participants talked
about how VR interactions can feel very real and affect users more than interactions in
other social media platforms might. As a result, they try to implement strategies to prevent
harm rather than respond to them after something has happened. These strategies included identifying
users might be struggling or those who might be there to disrupt the event and keeping
a closer eye on those people. Participants also discussed how they tried to work with
world designers to make sure harms would not go unnoticed in their spaces. One participant
said, and I quote, "if you create a space where people can affect others without being watched,
then you are part of the problem". As a result, a lot of worlds were designed as open spaces
so everyone could be observed.
Additionally, dedicated spaces for moderators were designed, where their view would not
be obstructed by other avatars or objects, such as the moderator shown in this image
standing on top of a hill. They would also use specific objects in the space that they
believe would affect user positioning. For instance, they had found that if they place
chairs in a space, users are more likely to spread out and sit on those chairs. This would
make it easier for the moderator to identify one individual that was causing harm as users
would not be huddled up together or spread unevenly in this space. We also asked participants
for suggestions on tools and abilities that could make moderation easier among the suggestions
of tools to control access, speech or movements. Participants also discussed the need for education
and a gradient of interventions. Most of the tools currently available to moderators are
limited to muting and removal.
However, one participant believe that kicking people out of a space is violent, and they
believe that platforms should reward less extreme moderation practices and educate the
moderators on the consequences of more extreme behavior. So in this work, through observations
and interviews with moderators, we were able to identify the harms that can happen in social
VR and how they defer from the harms in other social media platforms, as well as moderation
practices that are currently being used to address these problems. So what are some of
the design implications of our work? Firstly, we saw that moderators are shifting their
behavior towards preemptive and facilitatory responses because deescalation of real-time
interactions could be difficult. We also saw the need for more nuanced responses as the
limited tools that are available could result in moderators taking severe action because
they do not have other options. We also saw how spatial limitations in vision and hearing
can result in harmful behavior going unnoticed because the moderator can't see or hear what
is happening. Future work could look into designing tools or dashboards that can help
moderators detect behavior without having to see it themselves firsthand. While teamwork
was a strategy that is currently used by moderators, there are no clear tools or frameworks that
can be used to make this teamwork easy. For instance, many teams used other platforms
such as Discord to communicate with each other on top of being present in the world in vr.
Thank you for listening to my talk, and please feel free to contact me via email if you had
any questions.