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A Girl Was Allegedly Raped in The Metaverse. Is This The Beginning of A Dark New Future Nancy Jo Sales The Guardian
A Girl Was Allegedly Raped in The Metaverse. Is This The Beginning of A Dark New Future Nancy Jo Sales The Guardian
A Girl Was Allegedly Raped in The Metaverse. Is This The Beginning of A Dark New Future Nancy Jo Sales The Guardian
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1 of 5 23/02/24, 15:15
A girl was allegedly raped in the metaverse. Is this the beg... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/05...
T
he cheerful language with which tech companies describe their
platforms is often in stark contrast to the dark possibilities lurking
within them. Meta, for example, describes the metaverse as “the next
evolution in social connection and the successor to the mobile
internet”, a place where “virtual reality lets you explore new worlds and shared
experiences”. But for a young girl in the UK recently, that “shared experience”
was an alleged gang rape.
British police are investigating the sexual assault of the girl, identified only as
being under the age of 16, in what is said to be the first investigation of its kind in
the UK. The girl was reportedly wearing a virtual reality headset and playing an
immersive game in the metaverse when her avatar was attacked by several
others.
The difference, of course, is that while Call of Duty players can expect to be
virtually killed sometimes as part of the game, the girl had no reason to expect
that she might be raped. It isn’t yet known what game she was playing when the
alleged assault occurred, but obviously there isn’t an online game where the goal
for adult players is to rape children. The fact that they are able to in the metaverse
is the issue at the heart of this case, which has attracted international attention.
The question of whether virtual rape is “really rape” goes back to at least 1993,
when the Village Voice published an article by Julian Dibbell about “a rape in
cyberspace”. Dibbell’s piece reported on how the people behind avatars that were
sexually assaulted in a virtual community felt emotions similar to those of
victims of physical rape.
So while it is necessary for the police to investigate this case – with the courts to
decide on the appropriate punishment for the alleged offenders – it is equally
important for companies behind games in the metaverse to be held accountable
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A girl was allegedly raped in the metaverse. Is this the beg... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/05...
Their track record in regular online social media is questionable, however. For
instance, Meta has a notoriously bad record when it comes to protecting children
and teenagers. In 2021, the whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that
Facebook’s own internal research showed how using Instagram (which the
company owns) adversely affects teen girls’ confidence and body image. In
October of last year, a bipartisan coalition of 33 attorneys general filed a lawsuit
against Meta in California, alleging that Facebook and Instagram are responsible
for a “national youth mental health crisis”.
A spokesman for Meta has said that users in the metaverse have “an automatic
protection called personal boundary, which keeps people you don’t know a few
feet away from you”. But apparently this feature isn’t doing enough to protect
users from harm. This recent rape of a girl in the metaverse will be an important
test for the UK’s new Online Safety Bill, a year-old set of laws to protect children
and adults online. Some experts have expressed concerns that the bill doesn’t go
far enough, focusing more on the content users publish rather than their actions.
The next generation of kids will spend an estimated 10 years in virtual reality over
the course of their lifetimes – close to three hours a day – new research suggests.
It may be that lawmakers need to add further protections to keep them safe. In
the meantime, Meta could surprise everyone by stepping up and making the
metaverse a place that lives up to its upbeat marketing.
Nancy Jo Sales is the author, most recently, of Nothing Personal: My Secret Life
in the Dating App Inferno
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