As we all know, the metaverse, defined as ‘the future of the internet’, is getting more and more popular day by day. In the past days, we mentioned that the ecosystem Horizon Worlds, developed by Meta (formerly Facebook), one of the pioneers of the metaverse, experienced a ten-fold increase in the number of users in three months, and we shared with you how the popularity of the metaverse rose rapidly.
Of course, there are some doubts about this subject. Many experts think that malicious people can take advantage of the metaverse and make moves that can be characterized as ‘criminal’. It was stated that millions of dollars of investments made in products in these virtual universes could be made to cover up crimes such as money laundering. Now the news has revealed another scary result that the metaverse can create.
Children can easily enter virtual clubs with sexual content
According to the news of the BBC, children entering the metaverse can easily enter virtual strip clubs. In this research, conducted by a person pretending to be 13 years old, it was stated that this situation was observed in a metaverse application called VRChat. The researcher, who stated that she was taken to a virtual sex club despite showing herself at the age of 13, also noted that many adult men tried to be close to her, and sexually explicit toys and avatars were shown to her while she was browsing the platform.
Andy Burrows, from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, also made a statement regarding the impact of the metaverse on children, “Children are exposed to completely inappropriate, incredibly harmful content on these platforms. He added: “It is clear that safety is not taken into account in this product. These omissions also make it quite dangerous.”
According to the explanations, the main reason for this event is that most of the applications that can access virtual reality devices do not have age verification features. This shows that it can be very easy to create a fake profile on similar platforms and allow children to easily access inappropriate content. Experts also emphasize that this situation may be one of the terrible consequences of the metaverse
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