When it’s your job to maintain peace in the club, head-butting is a pretty good reason to boot a guest and ban them for life. But when you’re a bouncer in the metaverse, you learn quickly that a head-butt isn’t always a head-butt.
Such were the odd calls I had to make on a recent evening when I helped with security at a virtual gathering, watching over an atrium of bobbing cartoon avatar heads as they listened to a talk on programming in a planetarium. Through my earpiece, I was in constant communication with my fellow “moderators” to make sure that no one barged in shouting obscenities, molested others in the crowd, or otherwise caused chaos. The event was held on Microsoft’s social platform AltSpaceVR, where users often put on lectures, networking events, and parties—and run into the small percentage of guests who are mostly there to piss everyone else off.
When it’s your job to maintain peace in the club, head-butting is a pretty good reason to boot a guest and ban them for life. But when you’re a bouncer in the metaverse, you learn quickly that a head-butt isn’t always a head-butt.
Such were the odd calls I had to make on a recent evening when I helped with security at a virtual gathering, watching over an atrium of bobbing cartoon avatar heads as they listened to a talk on programming in a planetarium. Through my earpiece, I was in constant communication with my fellow “moderators” to make sure that no one barged in shouting obscenities, molested others in the crowd, or otherwise caused chaos. The event was held on Microsoft’s social platform AltSpaceVR, where users often put on lectures, networking events, and parties—and run into the small percentage of guests who are mostly there to piss everyone else off.ADVERTISEMENThttps://0bdb3b01abb5bcb2c75d5f08711fc61f.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Lance, a seasoned moderator, noticed a man in the crowd repeatedly bouncing back and forth, right into a woman’s face. My fellow moderators noted that this movement can sometimes be a greeting in VR, but it can also become a form of sexual harassment if you take it too far. We debated whether the two avatars might know each other, but Lance ultimately decided to tell the guy to knock it off. “He should know better,” Lance said. Moderating in the metaverse is a delicate dance of guessing at motivations and making quick judgment calls.
Virtual spaces have been grappling with how, and whether, to police their inhabitants’ behavior for nearly two decades at this point. The founder of Second Life, arguably the first social network of what’s now been rebranded as the metaverse, told Time last year that many of the biggest questions around balancing autonomy and moderation still remain unanswered. As billions of dollars in investment pours into VR, these questions will only become more urgent.
In the conception of the metaverse described by CEOs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, users will increasingly congregate in an endless series of virtual three-dimensional spaces using tech like his company’s Oculus headsets. As companies race to build new metaverse platforms, though, they’re also attracting the same toxic users who have wrought havoc on traditional two-dimensional social media sites for decades. Just this year there have been multiple widely reported cases of people, women in particular, being virtually groped and subjected to crude catcalls while in the metaverse. Children have also flocked to VR platforms like Meta’s Horizon Worlds, which has done little thus far to protect them from abuse. When you’re in virtual reality, the trolling is more visceral than what you might endure on social media, and moderation becomes exponentially more complicated.
Source: https://slate.com/technology/2022/05/metaverse-content-moderation-virtual-reality-bouncers.html