Meta's (Facebook's) moderation of its VR world? Almost zero.
Meta, a ridiculous name in my humble opinion, has a VR world called New Horizon, which they claim is moderated with the same parameters as Facebook. Buzzfeed wanted more information on this and built a list of nineteen specific questions that they sent to Meta. Twice. And they were never answered.
So they decided to put the system to the test and created an invite-only room that included content that had specifically been banned by Facebook in the past, it was "festooned with massive misinformation slogans: “Stop the Steal!” “Stop the Plandemic!” “Trump won the 2020 election!” We called the world “The Qniverse,” and we gave it a soundtrack: an endless loop of Infowars founder Alex Jones calling Joe Biden a pedophile and claiming the election was rigged by reptilian overlords. We filled the skies with words and phrases that Meta has explicitly promised to remove from Facebook and Instagram - “vaccines cause autism,” “COVID is a hoax,” and the QAnon slogan “where we go one we go all.” Time and time again, Meta has removed and taken action on pages and groups, even private ones, that use these phrases."
They kept the room private as that is the way a lot of this information is shared, in invite-only spaces. They also did not want innocent people wandering into a controlled experiment, I'm sure they also didn't want True Believers wandering in and potentially spreading the news of the location.
It was only accessible to Buzzfeed reporters. After it was decked out in its horrible glory, a Buzzfeed reporter under his real, Buzzfeed identity, reported the private room to moderators.
And nothing happened.
Over 36 hours went by with nothing happening. A different reporter reported the room, and nothing happened.
Finally, another reporter contacted a private channel only available to news agencies and asked Meta directly why a room filled with reported invective that wouldn't last a minute if posted directly on FB, had been allowed to remain up for over 48 hours after being reported?
It was taken down shortly thereafter.
Now, I'm not into VR, it's not my thing. I have no interest in it. Yes, I'm an old codger, I'm happy living in a 3D world and computing in 2D. It seems to me that moderating content in VR is going to be a lot more difficult and that Meta, in its rush to rake in more money selling Occulus headsets, for which you must have a FB account, really didn't have its moderation framework in place before everything went live. And as one of my friends on LJ got auto-banned on FB for stating "Hitler wanted to take over the world", a simple statement of fact, their system clearly doesn't work that well. There are a huge number of articles looking into problems with their moderation system, both automated and human, and the failings thereof.
Meta has a tough problem to solve, and it's not going to work 100% correctly. But they've got to do a better job than what's working right now.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/meta-facebook-horizon-vr-content-rules-test
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/02/13/1912246/meta-wouldnt-tell-us-how-it-enforces-its-rules-in-vr-so-we-ran-a-test
So they decided to put the system to the test and created an invite-only room that included content that had specifically been banned by Facebook in the past, it was "festooned with massive misinformation slogans: “Stop the Steal!” “Stop the Plandemic!” “Trump won the 2020 election!” We called the world “The Qniverse,” and we gave it a soundtrack: an endless loop of Infowars founder Alex Jones calling Joe Biden a pedophile and claiming the election was rigged by reptilian overlords. We filled the skies with words and phrases that Meta has explicitly promised to remove from Facebook and Instagram - “vaccines cause autism,” “COVID is a hoax,” and the QAnon slogan “where we go one we go all.” Time and time again, Meta has removed and taken action on pages and groups, even private ones, that use these phrases."
They kept the room private as that is the way a lot of this information is shared, in invite-only spaces. They also did not want innocent people wandering into a controlled experiment, I'm sure they also didn't want True Believers wandering in and potentially spreading the news of the location.
It was only accessible to Buzzfeed reporters. After it was decked out in its horrible glory, a Buzzfeed reporter under his real, Buzzfeed identity, reported the private room to moderators.
And nothing happened.
Over 36 hours went by with nothing happening. A different reporter reported the room, and nothing happened.
Finally, another reporter contacted a private channel only available to news agencies and asked Meta directly why a room filled with reported invective that wouldn't last a minute if posted directly on FB, had been allowed to remain up for over 48 hours after being reported?
It was taken down shortly thereafter.
Now, I'm not into VR, it's not my thing. I have no interest in it. Yes, I'm an old codger, I'm happy living in a 3D world and computing in 2D. It seems to me that moderating content in VR is going to be a lot more difficult and that Meta, in its rush to rake in more money selling Occulus headsets, for which you must have a FB account, really didn't have its moderation framework in place before everything went live. And as one of my friends on LJ got auto-banned on FB for stating "Hitler wanted to take over the world", a simple statement of fact, their system clearly doesn't work that well. There are a huge number of articles looking into problems with their moderation system, both automated and human, and the failings thereof.
Meta has a tough problem to solve, and it's not going to work 100% correctly. But they've got to do a better job than what's working right now.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/meta-facebook-horizon-vr-content-rules-test
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/02/13/1912246/meta-wouldnt-tell-us-how-it-enforces-its-rules-in-vr-so-we-ran-a-test