Safety Groups Urge Meta to Ban Minors From the Metaverse

A Bloomberg report claims that safety and advocacy organizations are trying to convince Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant Meta to drop plans to let minors access the metaverse.

On April 14, online safety organizations and professionals penned a letter to the CEO of Meta urging the company to abandon its intentions to encourage teens and young adults to use its metaverse app, Horizon Worlds. 

According to the report, the letter was signed by important safety organizations including Airplay, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, Common Sense Media, and others.

The advocates stated in the letter that “Meta must wait for more peer-reviewed research on the potential risks of the metaverse to be certain that children and teens would be safe.”

Meta to Implement Additional Measures for Minors

Notably, a research by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate from March discovered that adults had already started harassing individuals under the age of 18 on the app powered by Meta. Specifically, during 100 visits to the most common worlds in Horizon Universe, the research saw 19 cases of adult sexual harassment and abuse of adolescents.

Safety experts suggested that Meta should forge an alternative course with its metaverse project that protects the youth, saying that “should Meta throw open the doors of these worlds to minors rather than pause to protect them, you would, yet again, demonstrate your company to be untrustworthy when it comes to safeguarding young people’s best interests.”

Though Meta is reportedly ready to implement certain additional procedures to safeguard these youngsters from any metaverse-related illegal activities, Meta’s Joe Osborne told Bloomberg that the company does not presently have any intentions of dropping its ideas for children in the metaverse. 

Prior to allowing minors access to Horizon Worlds, Osborne said, “Before we make Horizon Worlds available to teens, we will have additional protections and tools in place to help provide age-appropriate experiences for them.”

Additionally, an individual in his thirties from South Korea received a four-year prison term in September of last year for creating and saving sexually explicit content involving youngsters that he attracted through the metaverse.