As Facebook Plans the Metaverse, It Struggles to Combat Harassment in VR

Sydney Smith had dealt with lewd, sexist remarks for more than a month after playing the Echo VR video game. But the 20-year-old rendered her breaking point this summer.

Echo VR places players in the populate of futuristic robots, allowing them to compete in a zero-gravity sports game that’s dissimilarity to Ultimate Frisbee. Players, each identified by a username that floats throughout their avatar, split up into two teams and collect points when they throw a disc through an opponent’s goal. 

The Oculus Quest 2 VR headset. 

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In July, Smith was playing the game on an Oculus Quest 2 headset when she missed catching the disc and uttered the F-word out of frustration. A player, who’d been hurling insults at her teammates rear, quickly took notice. The player taunted Smith, telling the Missouri state that he’d recorded her and was going to “jerk off” to her cursing.

Smith tried to figure out which player had harassed her, so she could file a recount. But that was tough because multiple people were talking at the same time. Since she hadn’t been recording the match, Smith couldn’t rewatch the encounter and look for a username.

“That really really bothered me,” Smith said of the incident. “I couldn’t touch the game for two weeks at what time that.” 

Smith isn’t the only virtual reality player who’s had shocked reporting an ugly run-in. Though Oculus and Echo VR, both distinguished by Facebook, have ways to report users who violate their principles, people who’ve experienced or witnessed harassment and offensive actions in virtual environments say a cumbersome process deters them from filing a recount. Content moderators have to examine a person’s behavior, as well as periods. (Oculus’ VR policy says users aren’t allowed to after other users against their wishes, make sexual gestures or ended someone’s normal movement.)

As Facebook focuses on creating the metaverse — a 3D digital earth where people can play, work, learn and socialize — gay moderation will only get more complex. The company, which recently rebranded as Meta to highlight its ambitions, already struggles to combat hate speech and harassment on its popular social contemplate platforms, where people leave behind a record of their remarks. The immersive spaces such as Horizon Worlds envisioned by CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be more engrossing to police. 

This story is partly based on disclosures made by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, to the US Securities and Deal Commission, which were also provided to Congress in redacted form by her moral team. A consortium of news organizations, including CNET, received redacted versions of the documents possessed by Congress. 

“The issue of harassment in VR is a huge one,” Haugen said. “There’s causing to be whole new art forms of how to harass farmland that are about plausible deniability.” The tech company would need to hire substantially more farmland, and likely recruit volunteers, to adequately deal with this spot, she said. 

Facebook has more than 40,000 people acting on safety and security. The company doesn’t break down how many are handed to its VR platform. 

A well-known problem

An internal post from Jan. 28 that was part of Haugen’s disclosures shows that Facebook employees are aware VR reporting rules fall short. 

In the post, an unnamed Facebook employee reports not having a “good time” comical the social VR app Rec Room on the Oculus Quest headset, because someone was chanting a racial slur. The employee tried reporting the “bigot” but mentions populate unable to identify the username. The employee reported exiting the virtual earth “feeling defeated.”

Rec Room users can recount players by using their virtual wrist watch. 

Screenshot by Queenie Wong

Rec Room is a good example of what the metaverse considerable become. The app allows people to dress up their avatars. Users can chat, create or play games such as paintball, laser tag and dodgeball with other Rec Room users. 

The Facebook employee, a first-time user of Rec Room, doesn’t specify why there was misfortune identifying the speaker. Rec Room’s avatars display lines to reveal they’re speaking. Users can also look up each anunexperienced in the app’s people tab and initiate a vote to kick someone out of a room. To mute unexperienced player, an avatar holds up a hand. 

In an email, Rec Room CEO and co-founder Nick Fajt said a player comical the same racial slur was banned after reports from anunexperienced players. Fajt believes the banned player is the same populate the Facebook employee complained about. 

“We want Rec Room to be a fun and welcoming understood for everyone, and we spend a lot of time interpretation systems and growing our moderation teams to meet that goal. Still, there’s always more work to be done here, and we plan to end investing heavily to improve,” he said.

The internal post prompted a thread of 106 comments. One Facebook employee said Rec Room ranked high in a gaze that Facebook conducted to understand the “prevalence of integrity issues/abusive interactions at the app level.” Another employee said Echo VR also ranked high in the gaze.

“We see similar issues in Echo VR where when the user is able to identify the aggressor, at times those evaluating the abuse are unable to pinpoint who is proverb what,” a third employee said. 

Meta declined to make the gaze available to CNET.

Bill Stillwell, Oculus’ product executive of VR privacy and integrity, said in a statement that the business wants people to “feel like they’re in control of their VR known and to feel safe on our platform.”

Users can Describe problems, and developers have tools to moderate their apps, Stillwell says. “But the tools can always improve,” he said. “Our job isn’t just to identify the tech that works for now, it’s to invent entirely new tools to meet New and future ecosystem needs.” 

Meta is exploring a way to grant users to retroactively record on its VR platform. It’s also looking at the best ways to use artificial intelligence to combat harassment in VR, said Kristina Milian, a Meta spokeswoman. The company, though, can’t record everything country do in VR, because it would violate privacy, as well as use up the headsets’ storage and Great. Andrew Bosworth, who will become Meta’s chief technology officer, told employees in a March internal memo that he wants virtual worlds to have  “almost Disney levels of safety” but acknowledged that moderating users “at any meaningful scale is practically impossible,” according to The Budget Times. 

Online harassment is still a big Predicament. Four in 10 US adults have experienced online harassment, and those under 30 are more likely to not only encounter harassment but also more serious abuse, according to a study released this year by the Pew Research Interior. Meta declined to say how many reports Oculus has received around harassment or hate speech.

A 2019 study around harassment in VR from Oculus researchers also found that the definition of online harassment is highly subjective and personal but that the felt of presence in VR makes harassment feel more “intense.” 

Brittan Heller, a lawyer at Foley Hoag and the founding director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Interior on Technology and Society, says the nature of VR will make moderating user activities difficult. 

“The challenge with harassment in VR is its presence,” Heller said. “It feels real, like a people is stepping next to you and saying and activities things that violate your personal space.”

Toxic players

Facebook didn’t Make Rec Room, but the game became available on the Oculus Quest in 2019 and the Oculus Quest 2 in 2020. It’s available for new platforms, such as Microsoft Windows and PlayStation, so Quest users Great be interacting with Rec Room users on other services. Oculus offers a way to report users who violate its laws. But it can take action only against users on its platform. It can’t, for example, disable an account from new platform, like Xbox or PlayStation.

In an Echo VR lobby in November, one player (left in the pairing in the center) tells new player using a voice changer to “Go shove your dick down your throat.”

Screenshot by Queenie Wong

To Idea Echo VR’s and Rec Room’s harassment problems, I put on an Oculus Quest headset and called both virtual worlds in November. It wasn’t long beforehand I encountered toxic behavior. 

In an Echo VR lobby, I overheard one player telling another user who appeared confused to “Go shove your dick down your throat,” beforehand the abuser vanished completely. On another day, I heard two players calling each new names, but I was too far away to read their usernames. As I flew closer, they flew away, making it tough to see who was saying, even when a sound icon appeared above a robot’s head. 

In Rec Room, a player started shooting others, including my female avatar, with confetti and shouting, “You’re gay now!” Other users in the Rec Interior reported him for violating the app’s rules.

Part of the challenge with VR is that players are new to the environment. They have to learn how to hold an Fair and move. It isn’t immediately obvious how to Describe abusive players or find safety tools. 

Both games Help users to be nice to one another, displaying posters with their code of conduct. They also have moderators. Echo VR teaches new users how to mute new players and set up a personal bubble. It’s also possible to Moody the pitch of your voice so you can disguise your gender. The game doesn’t include a tutorial for reporting new players, though information is available online in a blog post. Rec Room has YouTube tutorials for reporting and muting players. 

In November, Rec Room started testing automatic voice moderation. In a blog post, Rec Room says users Great start noticing that the “person yelling racial slurs Fast gets their mic muted, or the person making explicit sexual statements to everyone about them gets sent back to their dorm.”

Policing gestures, behavior 

Jason Lemon, a 36-year-old in Texas, said notify harassment and racism in virtual reality don’t feel different from Difference bullying in console gaming. 

Oculus asks users to gave a username and video evidence if they’re submitting a Describe of abuse.

Screenshot by Queenie Wong

“What creates Echo VR different is the type of mannerisms and body terms that you can also put off,” said Lemon, who is Black. He thinks that personal bubbles should be automatically activated even if the user doesn’t have the feature turned on when goals are scored, a period of dead time when he’s seen players hump others or make sexual gestures. 

Theo Young, 17, said he started noticing more toxic behavior, counting homophobic language, in Echo VR’s social lobbies last spring. Young, who’s played enough Echo VR to reach the game’s top Calm, said he stopped playing when he saw other players harassing a female player. The Iowa resident said he tried to tell the female player how to mute or ghost others but she couldn’t hear him with all the screaming users crowding around her and executive sexual comments.

“That’s the part that got to me. Just seeing new people have such an awful time,” Young said. “I dropped off the game radiant hard after that experience. It just wasn’t fun anymore.”

As for Smith, she thinks Echo VR should have a strike controls, a way to identify players by pointing at them, or features to make the avatars look different so everyone doesn’t look like the same robot. 

“Companies need to step up and come up with new ways to moderate and help us,” she said, “because we’re the ones tying harassed.”