Metaverse Why its already unsafe for women
Metaverse Why its already unsafe for women
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TVTranscript
00:00 I put my headset on, I created my account, selected my avatar.
00:05 Within about 30 seconds of being in the communal area,
00:08 I had three male avatars come towards me
00:11 and start verbally harassing me and sexually harassing me
00:14 and then proceed to sexually assault my avatar.
00:18 I asked them to stop, they refused to,
00:21 and then a fourth avatar came to take photos.
00:25 In 2021, researcher Nina Patel published a blog post
00:29 detailing her experience of sexual harassment in the metaverse.
00:32 Since then, she says she's received death threats and hateful messages.
00:37 They were relentless in following me
00:39 and were very quick to stay very close to my avatar
00:42 to be able to continue the verbal and sexual harassment.
00:47 Hate and harassment can be traumatising for many victims online.
00:50 But what happens when harassment follows you to the metaverse,
00:53 an online world where the lines between the virtual world
00:56 and the offline world are meant to be blurred?
00:59 My experience of sexual harassment in the metaverse
01:03 is the very tip of the iceberg.
01:05 I know that many women have experienced some form of misogyny
01:10 through digital experiences and now in the 3D metaverse as well.
01:14 So I know I'm not alone.
01:16 If we listen to people who have been harassed in VR,
01:20 they say it's much more like a real-world experience of harassment
01:24 than, say, receiving messages on social media.
01:29 And they say that's because it's much more immediate.
01:32 Someone's very, very close to you.
01:34 It feels like a violation of your personal space.
01:38 It's much like being in a room with other people.
01:40 So you can approach them as you get closer, their voice gets louder.
01:44 They can use their arms.
01:45 They can pretend to touch you, you know, virtually as well.
01:49 So it opens up sort of other possibilities for harassment.
01:52 My body was responding as though physiologically
01:54 it was happening in the physical world.
01:57 And so when these men came to attack me,
01:59 I went into fight-or-flight mode or freeze and I froze.
02:03 And suddenly I couldn't remember how to use the controllers.
02:06 It took me a moment to kind of think through the experience that I just had
02:11 and unpackage, you know, was this something that I did wrong?
02:15 We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet.
02:22 We'll be able to feel present, like we're right there with people,
02:25 no matter how far apart we actually are.
02:28 There are many metaverse platforms developed by various tech giants.
02:32 In recent years, billions of dollars have been poured into the metaverse
02:36 by companies such as Facebook,
02:38 which even went so far as to rebrand its parent company, Meta.
02:42 The metaverse is generally marketed as a virtual world,
02:45 similar to a video game, where people can interact with other users.
02:49 When you go into virtual reality, you put on a VR headset.
02:53 And when you put that on, you appear to be in a three-dimensional space
02:58 and you are represented by an avatar,
03:02 which is a 3D representation of your own body.
03:05 Headset is tracking where I'm looking, so I can change where I'm looking,
03:09 get a new view inside the VR space, but it also tracks where I am in the room.
03:13 So I can actually move around in the VR space
03:17 and I can visit different areas.
03:19 I can approach someone and talk to them as well.
03:22 Callum Hood is the head of research at the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.
03:26 His team studies and monitors online hate and misinformation.
03:30 But the metaverse, he says, poses its own unique challenges.
03:35 We found that in these VR spaces, people seem to be pretty aware
03:39 that they're pretty anonymous,
03:41 that there's not much enforcement of the rules.
03:45 So there was a sense that people were behaving perhaps much worse
03:49 and by default being abusive to other users
03:52 in a way that they wouldn't if it was a social media account or in the real world.
03:57 I think the fundamental problem is
04:01 we don't really have a conscience about what should be the appropriate behaviours
04:07 or what should be the appropriate social norms in the metaverse
04:11 because it's so new and emerging.
04:14 Guo Freeman is a researcher and professor at Clemson University in South Carolina.
04:19 Freeman and her team study how people behave in the metaverse
04:22 and other computing technologies.
04:25 There are real people there, so you need to treat them how you would a real person.
04:29 Women and other marginalised populations,
04:32 they do have a higher risk in terms of harassment
04:37 in social media and the future metaverse.
04:39 The main reason is because they are more identifiable
04:43 than other online environments.
04:45 I think about if that had been one of my daughters
04:47 who had put on the headset that day, how they would have responded.
04:51 Young users are very common in these VR spaces,
04:55 but when it comes to young girls in particular,
04:57 they're often targeted with a sort of virtual harassment
05:01 purely because people recognise their voice as female.
05:04 Preventing the kind of hate and harassment Nina experienced,
05:07 which the CCDH has witnessed happen to children and other marginalised groups as well,
05:13 will likely be more challenging than regulating traditional social media,
05:16 according to Hood.
05:18 After I shared my story, they implemented safety bubbles,
05:22 which are set on as default.
05:25 The safety bubbles prevent people from coming too close to you,
05:29 and you can also block and report people in the space.
05:33 If you block someone, then you can't see them anymore,
05:37 but everyone else in the room can still see them,
05:39 and they're still in the room with you.
05:42 The only thing is that you visually can't see them.
05:44 So it's quite an incomplete solution to the problem of harassment on these platforms.
05:49 The big difference about being harassed in VR versus online
05:56 is that if you're harassed or abused on a traditional social media platform,
06:00 you probably have a post or a comment or a direct message
06:04 that serves as evidence, and usually it's pretty permanent.
06:08 When it happens in VR,
06:10 unless you happen to be recording everything that you're doing in VR,
06:14 you might not have a record of it happening.
06:16 Callum and his team recorded hours of interactions in the metaverse
06:23 and found that in VRChat, one of the most popular social VR apps,
06:27 an instance of harassment occurs roughly every seven minutes.
06:32 In Meta's Horizon World,
06:33 they recorded incidents of abuse directed at minors by adults,
06:37 including sexually explicit insults,
06:39 racial misogynistic and homophobic harassment.
06:43 VRChat told CNN that they had put measures in place to address harassment,
06:48 such as personal space tools.
06:49 The company told CNN they were working hard
06:52 to make VRChat a safe and welcoming place for everyone.
06:55 I think what you need to do is introduce some standards
06:59 on things like making sure that products are safe before you release them,
07:03 on being transparent about what the harms are and how you deal with them.
07:06 We have an opportunity today in 2023
07:09 to shape this new technology system differently
07:12 so that it's not yet another technology or system
07:16 that silences women and objectifies their bodies,
07:20 but becomes a technology that's fit for purpose
07:22 and does more good than it does damage.
07:25 (MUSIC)