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Addressing Hateful and Misleading Content in the Metaverse

2023; Volume: 1; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.54501/jots.v1i5.109

2770-3142

Inga Kristina Trauthig, Samuel Woolley,

Education and Learning Interventions

The metaverse in 2023In 2023 the tech sector has been defined by a spate of announcements about job cuts and reverberating concerns about artificial intelligence tools, particularly the chatbot ChatGPT (Alfonseca and Zahn 2023;Shankland 2023).The metaverse-the extended reality (XR) space tied to a decades-old science fiction vision of an immersive virtual reality (VR) world (Kirkpatrick 2022)-is partially linked to both of Silicon Valley's woes.For example, it has consumed substantial resources from social media companies such as Meta, which invested billions into its metaverse business Reality Labs and hence exerted economic pressure on the company to save money elsewhere (Daniel 2022).Online safety issues in the metaverse may worsen if actions are not taken.We outline our argument and present a call for action over the next sections, which start with explaining current conceptualizations of the metaverse and giving a brief interdisciplinary overview of research on the metaverse.We then deduct existing and potential future avenues for malevolent exploitation with a focus on mis-, and disinformation, and finally outline recommendations that could alleviate negative effects on the individual and societies from the metaverse.The metaverse presents novel avenues for abuse regarding behavioral change related to embodied experiences, which researchers such as Ahn et al. have been studying for years (Ahn, Bailenson, and Park 2014).We fear that malevolent exploitation of the metaverse is not being adequately addressed by either companies or policymakers.Pundits might point fun at both Meta's XR world and broader tech sector moves toward VR and augmented reality (AR).But the very fact that the most powerful companies in tech have invested billions of dollars into these tools suggests that some business executives hope the investments will pay out and the metaverse will become more popular among consumers (Chohan 2022).Experts such as Brittan Heller and Katherine Lo continue to underscore the particular dangers of a disembodied digital world (Atlantic Council 2022).Imagine entering a virtual environment that you navigate as an avatar.Not only do you see and hear as the avatar, you feel as it does, too.You are in a meeting space with other users, chatting casually about some topic or another.Suddenly, your avatar is taken by the hand, pulled toward another avatar and touched without your consent.In the offline world, you experience the touch.Offline, you may physically be able to remove yourself from the situation, report to nearby authorities of different kinds, or even find mental health support if the incident is difficult to process.But in the metaverse it is unclear if this incident counts as an assault-and if so, who decides that?Will there be any consequences for the perpetrator?Do you even know who the perpetrator "really"