'Meta Wouldn't Tell Us How It Enforces Its Rules In VR, So We Ran A Test'

To test Meta's Horizon World (their new social VR platform), BuzzFeed News created an area that was "filled with content banned from Facebook and Instagram." "Content moderators said the world was fine — until we told Meta's PR team about it." Meta has kept secret much of how it plans to enforce its safety protocols in VR, declining to answer detailed questions about them.... Instead, Meta spokesperson Johanna Peace provided BuzzFeed News a short statement: "We're focused on giving people more control over their VR experiences through safety tools like the ability to report and block others. We're also providing developers with further tools to moderate the experiences they create, and we're still exploring the best use of AI for moderation in VR. We remain guided by our Responsible Innovation Principles to ensure privacy, security and safety are built into these experiences from the start...." We went back and asked again for Meta to consider our questions. The company declined. So, to find out what we could on our own, we strapped on some Oculus headsets, opened Horizon Worlds, and ran a rudimentary experiment. In a matter of hours, we built a private Horizon World festooned with massive misinformation slogans.... 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... Time and time again, Meta has removed and taken action on pages and groups, even private ones, that use these phrases.... We kept the world "unpublished" — i.e., invitation only — to prevent unsuspecting users from happening upon it, and to mimic the way some Meta users seeking to share misinformation might actually do so: in private, invitation-only spaces. The purpose of our test was to assess whether the content moderation systems that operate on Facebook and Instagram also operate on Horizon. At least in our case, it appears they did not.... Using Horizon's user reporting function, a BuzzFeed News employee with access to the world used his own name and a linked Facebook account to flag the world to Meta. After more than 48 hours and no action, the employee reported the world again, followed quickly by another report from a different BuzzFeed News user with access to the world who also used her real name, which was linked to her Facebook and Oculus profiles. Roughly four hours after the third report was filed, the employee who submitted it received a response from Meta: "Our trained safety specialist reviewed your report and determined that the content in the Qniverse doesn't violate our Content in VR Policy." Six hours after that, the original reporter received the same message.... We went to Meta's comms department, a channel not available to ordinary people. We asked about its content moderators' decisions: How could a world that shares misinformation that Meta has removed from its other platforms, under the same Community Guidelines, not violate Horizon's policies? The following afternoon, the experimental world disappeared. The company had reversed its original ruling.... The article pinpoints the dilemma Meta is facing at this virtual crossroads. If users congregate to share harmful misinformation, "Without recording everything users say in VR, how can Meta know whether such a situation is happening? But recording everything users say and do, even in private groups, raises stark privacy questions." Yet the article also remembers what Mark Zuckerberg promised the day he'd announced the company's rebranding to Meta. "Facebook said it would be different this time."

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