Dozens of children’s advocacy groups have called on Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to rethink plans to allow minors onto Meta’s Horizon Worlds metaverse VR app.
Currently restricted to 18-plus users, Meta intends to bring the age limit down to 13 in the coming months, a move that Fairplay, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Common Sense Media and others say could lead to young people being singled out for abuse.
“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,” the group wrote in a letter delivered to Zuckerberg on Friday.
“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,” the letter said, alluding to the 2021 whistleblowing scandal accusing Facebook of placing profits over childrens’ mental health protections.
Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne stated: “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.”
The advocacy groups’ hearts are in the right place, but it beggars the question: Do kids really give a toss about Horizon Worlds?
Since Meta doesn’t publish population counts, it’s hard to tell, though the Wall Street Journal suggested the population fell by a third in 2022- from 300,000 to 200,000.
Internal statistics seen by the WSJ showed that only 9% of worlds built by creators are ever visited by at least 50 people, while most are never visited at all. “An empty world is a sad world,” the documents apparently stated.
If the actual numbers are better than that, one would think that Meta would have seized the opportunity to prove the WSJ wrong.
In a time when young adults can play almost photorealistic, intricately designed, interactive computer games to their heart's content, why would they want to spend their time in an empty, sad world?
It’s a fair question to ask, though for the children who do decide to visit Zuck’s metaverse, it is also only fair for the advocacy groups to demand proper protections.