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When Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse last year, he conjured an image of harmonious social connections in an immersive virtual world. But his company’s first iterations of the space have not been very harmonious.
Several women have reported incidents of harassment. I had several uncomfortable moments with male strangers on social apps run by both Meta Platforms Inc (formerly known as Facebook Inc) and Microsoft Corp.when I visited them in December.
These are early days for the metaverse, but that’s precisely the problem. If safety isn’t baked early on into the design of a new social platform, it is much harder to secure down the line. Gaming firms like Riot Games Inc, the maker of League of Legends, for instance, have faced an uphill battle trying to rescue a virtual community from toxic behaviour.
Facebook also knows this problem well: It struggled to put the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube with Covid vaccine misinformation, as highlighted by a whistleblower last year. If the company had been faster to design a prompt asking users to stop and read certain links before sharing them, that might have limited anti-vax posts from going viral and costing lives.
It turns out Facebook has grappled internally with building safety features into its new metaverse services. In 2016, it released Oculus Rooms, an app where anyone with an Oculus headset could hang out in a virtual apartment with friends and family. Despite the cartoonish-looking avatars, meeting a friend in Rooms was a captivating experience. But the service was destined to remain niche, with so few people in possession of a headset. The way to encourage more growth was to bring together headset owners who didn’t know each other, according to Jim Purbrick, who was an engineering manager on Facebook’s VR products between 2017 and 2020.
In 2017, Facebook built Oculus Venues (now Horizon Venues), a virtual space where it would show films or professional sports games in the hope that visitors would mingle and make connections. It was a critical shift, strengthening the company’s ability to grow its new VR platform — but also opening it up to new risks.
—Bloomberg