I put my headset on.
I created my account, selected my avatar and within about 30 seconds of being in the communal area, I had three male avatars come towards me and start verbally harassing me and sexually harassing me and then proceed to sexually assault my avatar.
I asked them to stop, they refused to.
And then 1/4 avatar came to take photos in 2021 researcher, Nina Patel published a blog post detailing her experience of sexual harassment in the meta buss.
Since then, she says she's received death threats and hateful messages.
They were relentless in following me and were very quick to stay very close to my avatar to be able to, you know, continue the verbal and sexual harassment, hate and harassment can be traumatizing for many victims online.
But what happens when harassment follows you to the metaverse, an online world where the lines between the virtual world and the offline world are meant to be blurred.
My experience of sexual harassment in the metaverse is the very tip of the iceberg.
I know that many women have experienced some form of misogyny through digital experiences.
And now in the 3D metaverse as well.
So I know I'm not alone if we listen to people who have been harassed in VR, they say it's much more like a real world experience of harassment than say, receiving messages on social media.
And they say that's because it's much more immediate.
Someone's very, very close to you.
It feels like a violation of your personal space.
It's much like being in a room with other people so you can approach them as you get closer, their voice gets louder, they can use their arms, they can pretend to touch you, you know, virtually as well.
So it opens up sort of other possibilities for harassment.
My body was, you know, responding as though physiologically was happening in the physical world.
And so when these men came to attack me, I went into fight or flight mode or freeze and I froze and suddenly I couldn't remember how to use the controllers.
It took me a moment to kind of think through the experience that I just had and unpackaged, you know, was this something that I did wrong?
We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet.
We'll be able to feel present like we're right there with people.
No matter how far apart we actually are.
There are many metaverse platforms developed by various tech giants.
In recent years, billions of dollars have been poured into the metaverse by companies such as Facebook, which even went so far as to rebrand its parent company meta.
The metaverse is generally marketed as a virtual world similar to a video game where people can interact with other users.
When you go into virtual reality, you put on a VR headset and when you put that on, you appear to be in a three dimensional space and you are represented by an avatar which is a 3d representation of your own body headset is tracking where I'm looking so I can change where I'm looking, get a new view inside the VR space.
But it also tracks where I am in the room.
So I can actually move around in the VR space so I can visit different areas.
I can approach someone and talk to them as well.
Callum Hood is the head of research at the Center for countering digital hate.
His team studies and monitors online hate and misinformation.
But the metaverse he says poses its own unique challenges.
We found that in these VR spaces, people seem to be pretty aware that they're pretty anonymous that there's not much enforcement of the rules.
So there was a sense that people were behaving perhaps much worse and by default, being abusive to other users in a way that they wouldn't if it was a social media account or in the real world.
I think the fundamental problem that is we don't really have a conscience about what should be the appropriate behaviors or is what should be the appropriate social norms in the metaverse because it's so new and emerging.
Gua Freeman is a researcher and professor at Clemson University in South Carolina Freeman.
And her team study how people behave in the metaverse and other computing technologies.
There are real people there.
So you need to treat them how you were a real person, women and other marginalized like populations, they do have a higher risk uh like in terms of harassment in social world and the future matters.
And the main reason is because they are more identifiable than like other like online environments.
I think about if that had been one of my daughters who had put on the headset that day, how they would have responded.
Young users are very common in these VR spaces.
But when it comes to young girls in particular, they're often targeted with a sort of virtual harassment purely because people recognize their voice as female, preventing the kind of hate and harassment, Nina experienced which the CC DH has witnessed happen to Children and other marginalized groups as well will likely be more challenging than regulating traditional social media.
According to hood.
After I shared my story, they implemented safety bubbles which are set on as default.
The safety bubbles prevent people from coming too close to you.
And you can also block and report people in the space.
If you lock someone, then you can't see them anymore.
But everyone else in the room can still see them and they're still in the room with you.
The only thing is that you visually can't see them.
So it's quite an incomplete solution to the problem of harassment on these platforms.
But the big difference about being harassed in VR versus online is that if you're harassed or abused on the traditional social media platform, you probably have a post or a comment or a direct message that serves as evidence and usually it's pretty permanent when it happens in VR unless you happen to be recording everything that you're doing in VR, you might not have a record of it happening.
Callum and his team recorded hours of interactions in the metaverse and found that in VR chat, one of the most popular social VR apps, an instance of harassment occurs roughly every seven minutes in meta's horizon world.
They recorded incidents of abuse directed at minors by adults including sexually explicit insults, racial misogynistic and homophobic harassment.
VR Chat told CNN that they had put measures in place to address harassment such as personal space tools.
The company told CNN they were working hard to make VR Chat a safe and welcoming place for everyone.
I think what you need to do is introduce some standards on things like making sure that products are safe before that you release them on being transparent about what the harms are and how you deal with them.
And we have an opportunity today in 2023 to shape this new technology system differently so that it's not yet another technology or system that silences women and objectifies their bodies but becomes a technology that's fit for purpose and does more good than it does damage.