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- Metaverse is fraught with risks, partly because it’s new, and partlybecause of the pace of adoption. Regulation is well behind thetechnology, to the alarm of some academicobservers.rosenberg2022regulation
- Abuse; because of the real-time and spatio-temporal abuse happens less like in the current web 2 social media, and more like in the real world, but with less opportunity for repercussions. It might be that natural language processing and machine learning can help with this, but it’s a tough problem. One idea might be to record the speech to text of interactions between participants, and flag to them if a “bullying, harassment, predation threshold” is met. This could be encrypted with the public keys of the participants and a notice sent to them that if they wished to follow up with authorities then they have the necessary attestations and proofs. This is minimally invasive and privacy preserving, and acts as a strong disincentive to repeat offence. It can also feed into a global “web of trust” reputation system in a ‘zero knowledge’ way. Users who flag abuse to the reputation system can leverage the machine learning opinion without revealing what happened (though they would have the data). This would also act as a disincentive without the social stigma issues of reporting.
- Reporting could be achieved without machine learning identification of potential problems, but there would have to be a social cost to reporting (like gossiping incessantly about others) which would erode the social score of the reporting entity. This would mitigate bot based reputation harm.
- Miscommunication; which as we have seen in the early section of the metaverse chapter is both complex and hard to mitigate
- Lost information
- Distraction
- Jitter, judder, jagginess, and interruption of flow; because the network overhead is higher than other communication media it’s much more exposed to latency effects
- Physical harms, especially to developing brains and ocular systems
- The UK is positioning itselfto heavily regulate safeguarding in the space, with significant fines for non-compliance. This will of course simply lead to users operating on platforms which are not subject to UK law. some links on consumerprotection