There was a sexual assault case in the virtual world called Horizon Worlds, which can be accessed with Quest glasses produced by Oculus, the virtual reality-VR company owned by Meta and prepared by Meta. An unnamed woman who was in the beta version of Horizon Worlds, which launched in 2019, announced that she was harassed on November 26.
According to the news of Independent Turkish, Meta launched an internal investigation on the incident. As a result of the investigation, it was revealed that the user did not activate the security feature designed to prevent harassment in the virtual environment.
Harassment in the virtual world is no different from real life
Woman, who participated in the closed beta, said about the harassment she suffered in the Horizon Worlds group on Facebook, “Sexual harassment on the normal internet is no joke. But being in VR makes it more intense. I was not only harassed by hand yesterday. There were also those who supported this behavior. What happened, made me feel at the Plaza. ‘ (the gathering place used to enter user-created worlds and games) felt lonely.
Vivek Sharma, Meta’s vice president of Horizon Worlds, said the incident was “absolutely unfortunate”. In addition, Sharma added that these experiences will serve to make the Safe Zone feature “easy and accessible”, which prevents those who do not feel safe on the platform from interacting with other users. On the other hand, Meta spokesperson Kristina Milian stated that not using these features offered by the company is not a user error and that the platform will continue to be developed in order to understand how such features are used and to enable users to report their problems more easily.
Experts, on the other hand, stated that harassment in the virtual world is no different from real life. Kahterine Cross, an academic who works on online harassment, stated that virtual worlds were developed to make people think that they are in a physical space and that physical activities are experienced in a three-dimensional environment. For this reason, Cross noted that the harassment experienced by people on these platforms is quite dangerous, and added that the Safe Zone feature is insufficient to prevent harassment cases.
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