-long event series in October during National/International Bullying Month.
The news in the media since the announcement of Facebook Meta’s investment in the metaverse brought many articles and investigations about the toxicity in social VR and the metaverse. We’ve featured a few articles below.
To explore this further, this is an informal “State of the Metaverse” overview of cyberbullying. Note that examples in this review may appear to exaggerate the toxic nature of the metaverse. The incidents described, except for the staff moderators and multiplayer esports games, is not the norm for most well-moderated VR events, virtual worlds, and social VR platforms.
It is a myth that online harassment, sexual assaults, and bullying are on the increase in social media as well as social VR, even though the media sensationalizes it. The truth is much more complicated.
The most recent Pew Research Center study on online harassment in 2021 did not cover specifically social VR, but the findings represent it in general. While the number of reported online harassment encounters have not increased since 2017, the severity has worsened. The majority reported that online harassment is a major problem, with 41% reporting from direct personal experience. Roughly two-thirds of adults under 30 have been harassed online, with women targeted twice as more than men, and Black, Hispanic, and Asian targeted even more than Whites.
A study released in January 2022 for International Safer Internet Day called the “Civility, Safety, and Interaction Online, in cooperation with Microsoft’s Digital Civility Index (DCI), found that across 22 countries, teens aged 13-17 and adults 18-74 reported on their exposure to 21 online risks across four categories and found that since 2106, there has been a slight decrease in perceived online attacks, increasing slightly with the pandemic and increased online activity and education.
Perception is very different from the facts. The decrease in online harassment and attacks does not mean that online harassment and bullying is going away or we should pay less attention to it. Nearly half of children in US grade schools reported being bullied and a third of students admitted to bullying others. Globally, suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among 15-19 year olds, with bullying and cyberbullying often part of the trigger. Trolls find clever ways to get around platform bans and blocks, then move onto another platform to continue their behavior, and we need to make the consequences of their actions stronger. Although 49 states have anti-bullying legislation, there is no US federal law. Countries around the world have laws, but many are toothless. We want stronger laws and support.
Facts aside, parents need to be aware and cautious when purchasing VR headsets as toys for their under-13 year old children, and ensure parental controls are enabled to limit exposure to adult content and risk.
 As reported in Reveal News by Jessica Buchleitner, it feels very real in virtual reality.
As a consultant and speaker, Gittins is granted access to events featuring the latest virtual reality technologies. But one experience testing a multiplayer game in March 2016 at a limited access event that left an impression she can’t shake. The players were on two teams – two men on one and Gittins and another man on the other. Motion tracking allowed players to move their hands in the game. Gittins waved at the man embodied in a female avatar next to her.
A Bloomberg reporter shared a first-hand account of a metaverse experience that triggered deep discomfort.
I can still remember the first time I heard the N-word uttered aloud. I was just a kid having fun on the playground of my elementary school, when a Black boy I didn’t know well used the word in passing. Though I knew he meant it innocently, I felt startled by the exchange. That moment would jumpstart a yearslong personal exploration of how Black people suffer from, respond to and repurpose words designed to demean our humanity.
The last time I heard the N-word was a few weeks ago, after I emerged from a brief appearance at a 2 Chainz concert in Horizon Venues, a live events app on Meta Platforms Inc.’s Quest virtual reality headset. Another user — who was Black, at least by the appearance of his avatar — called out to me, using the N-word as he invited me to travel to another part of the app. We were both legless cartoons in the virtual world, but hearing the word from his real voice unsettled me just as much as it did on the playground decades ago.
…Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words post-traumatic tears were streaming down her face—a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words’ emotional content was no mere playacting. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL [Real Life] nor the VR facts alone can quite account for. Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of “civility.” Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player’s life, limb, or material well-being, here now was the player legba issuing aggrieved and heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle’s dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by RL’s lights, woefully understated by VR’s, the tone of legba’s response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them.
There is no doubt in the minds of active VR users that the immersive experience feels real, even when we tell ourselves it isn’t. Our bodies respond as if it real, and we feel the emotional and physical consequences.

That’s what some moderators of Facebook virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds are dealing with, and it looks just as nightmarish as it sounds.
“Trying to not smash my headset, like in frustration,” one Horizon Worlds Community Guide with the screen name Peanutbutter can be heard saying in a TikTok uploaded by @vrpranksters after interacting with a bunch of kids fighting and screaming over a virtual boomerang.
The so-called “pranksters” and trolls often film purposefully initiated aggressive experiences by harassing moderators while live streaming and recording the experience, later claiming how they were harassed and victimized by the staff, twisting the truth in the name of entertainment.
Social VR moderators report the same mental health impacts as social media moderators, fighting against personal attacks, harassment, impersonation including identity theft and privacy violations, and visual and verbal exposure to violence and toxicity. In 2019, an article in The Verge revealed the secret lives of Facebook moderators and the very real impact of their work, leading to a lawsuit due to PTSD-like symptoms. The report helped lead to a USD $52M compensation package agreement with Facebook (Meta) for content moderators for mental healthcare. A year later, the workers claimed the compensation and support were inadequate and many still report PTSD and other mental health and physical issues due to the toxic environments they are moderating.
Understanding the motivation and mental health of trolls and online toxic personalities is a frequent topic for the Cyberbullying Team discussions. We want to understand why they do what they do. We want to understand how to prevent and protect ourselves. We want to encourage toxic people to embrace a more positive role in society.
The toxic individuals are so prevalent, there are over 100 names to represent their behaviors such as trolls, VR creepers, ghosters, pranksters, griefers, catfishers, baiters, bustrs, cannibals, haters…the list is extensive. While it is important to protect ourselves and others, and educate ourselves about the laws and methodologies these toxic people use, it’s just as important to understand their reasons, psychology, and how we can reduce and prevent more harm.
Peer-pressure, especially with males, often creates gangs who think it is “fun” to harass and attack female players. Some reporters state they were attacked by adults when in reality, they maybe teenagers, working in packs as they would in the real world.
Targeting virtual platforms as something unique implies that VR platforms and environments are more dangerous than the rest, yet time and again, research and surveys reveal that virtual worlds and environments are no worse than anywhere else. And the process of banning toxic players is definitely more complicated than we think.
Informa author, Yasaman Farazan, researched the issue of how developers cope with toxic behavior in VR and the challenges, recommending stronger tools in place early on to allow users to defend and protect themselves and quickly report abuse.
Unfortunately, most developed and developing platforms are in retrofit mode.
Recent reports of attacks against women caused Meta to add a “personal boundary” around the avatars in Horizon so people cannot touch each others’ avatars. While this may stop some forms of harassment, it doesn’t do anything about visual and verbal abuse and other assaults.
AltspaceVR has long featured powerful self-moderation safety tools such as a personal space bubble and mute and block options. VR Chat and others have similar tools, but users need to be educated on how to use them, and how to use them in response to an attack situation when the shock of the event often clouds decision-making.
Social VR platforms have reputations for expected experiences. VR Chat has easy to access tools and reporting systems, but