“When claims of sexual misconduct in the metaverse have been made on social media, users have responded with jokes and laughter emojis. The general consensus? Because these incidents happened virtually, they would have had little impact.”
concert with his friend Jeremy when “this fairly creepy-looking bald guy runs up, bends double and starts pumping his cartoon hands at our cartoon crotches”.
Verisimilitude is fundamental to the success of the metaverse. The whole point, researchers say, is to create a fully functioning virtual environment that is as close to reality as possible. “Meta deliberately designed its Horizon apps so that there were almost no limits on how users interact with each other,” claims Hood. “The idea was that this would allow people to approach and interact with each other as easily as walking up to someone in the street.
“Without consent, any kind of sexual activity is sexual violence – that is true for activities that take place online or offline,” says Jayne Butler, CEO of the charity Rape Crisis. “There is a tendency to minimise online abuse or think of it as less damaging than that committed offline, but there is no sliding scale for sexual violence, and any form of it can be traumatising for victims and survivors.
So what is being done to combat this? Meta has responded to reports such as Patel’s by launching various new safety measures. This includes a feature that means when one avatar gets close to another, their hand vanishes, and another “personal boundary” feature, which puts an automatic ring around avatars to “prevent anyone from invading their personal space”. Additionally, just like on Meta’s other social platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, users can mute, report and block people.
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