When Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was changing ‘Facebook’ to ‘Meta’, he also revealed that there would be new experiences including a virtual world, a VR platform called Horizon Worlds.
And while the real world has bad people, it appears that they’ve taken to this virtual world to carry out their disgusting, vile behaviour.
43-year-old London-based beta tester, Nina Jane Patel, shared via a Medium post that literally within seconds of joining the platform, her avatar was gang-raped by 3-4 male avatars.
“Within 60 seconds of joining, I was verbally and sexually harassed. 3 to 4 male avatars, with male voices, essentially, but virtually gang-raped my avatar and took photos,”
“As I tried to get away, they yelled, ‘don’t pretend you didn’t love it‘ and ‘go rub yourself off to the photo‘,” she wrote.
She felt so shocked by how quickly it all went down that she ultimately forgot about Meta’s Safe Zone feature, which allows users to place a block on interaction with other users.
“A horrible experience that happened so fast and before I could even think about putting the safety barrier in place. I froze,”
“It was surreal. It was a nightmare.”
Patel went on to explain that no matter how far our technological advances go, there will always be uncivilised people.
“Virtual Reality, Metaverse and other technologies are designed for human interfacing. By design, to offer us ways to engage with the world, supported, integrated and symbiotically with technology,”
“And no matter how we progress, we will always be humans and humans are real,” she said.
A Meta spokesperson has since shared that the company will take further steps to ensure the safety of their users.
“We’re sorry to hear this happened. We want everyone in Horizon Venues to have a positive experience, easily find safety tools that can help in a situation like this, and help us investigate and take action,”
“Horizon Venues should be safe and we are committed to building it that way. We will continue to make improvements as we learn more about how people interact in these spaces, especially when it comes to helping people report things easily and reliably,” they explained.
While we’re happy and excited that the future of interacting via virtual reality is here, it is rather concerning that bad people are already taking advantage of these advances.
We genuinely hope that they find the perpetrators and ban them from the platform.
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