Metaverse: The Troll's Playground

Apple iPod creator warns the metaverse will encourage trolls by degrading human connection. According to Tony Fell, removing the ability "to look into the other person's face" allows room for toxicity to happen. In this thread, our community discusses the metaverse and online trolling.

This Slogging thread by Mónica Freitas, Arthur Tkachenko, Jack Boreham and Sara Pinto occurred in slogging's official #technology channel, and has been edited for readability.

"Apple's iPod creator has warned the so-called metaverse risks creating more trolls and damaging human interaction.
The virtual reality-based metaverse removes the ability "to look into the other person's face," Tony Fadell said.
"If you put technology between that human connection that's when the toxicity happens," he said."

"While Mr Fadell said the technology behind the metaverse has merit: "When you're trying to make social interaction and social connection, when you can't look into the other person's face, you can't see their eyes you don't have real humanistic ways of connecting.

"It become disintermediated and you have the ability at that point to create more trolls, people who hide behind things and then use that to their advantage to get attention."

He added: "We need to regain control of that human connection, we don't need more technology between us.""

"Ken Kutaragi, who invented Sony's PlayStation game console, said: "You would rather be a polished avatar instead of your real self? That's essentially no different from anonymous message board sites."

Mr Fadell said: "We had the same problem with text-based commenting and with blogs, we've had it with videos now we're going to have it in metaverse."

Though this may be a controversial point to metaverse when such a significant number of people are on board, it seems reasonable to ask: what are we going to do about trolls in the metaverse?

As we're on the topic, this podcast episode offers an inside perspective on online trolling and the individuals who do it. It might give you a different view on the matter: https://open.spotify.com/episode/27ErDWrnpCp8Y1UCrO8QSC?si=b2e8b08d5a544972

What are your thoughts on this?

I'm sad that iPod get killed by Apple 🙂

I'm sure that a lot of ways to prevent trolling. I tend to think of metaverses, not about one huge place for everybody (at least from the beginning).

plus, MMeta started working on VRs for years now, but mass adoption still has not happened, yet. I know maybe 5-8 people from my circle that uses VR headset more than a few hours per month. Limarc Ambalina is one of them :)
People love monitors, and displays and buy new TVs more often.

I assuming we can finally put chips into our bodies and use it as login into metaverse, so trolls can be found and banned.

Arthur Tkachenko, interesting but that would raise a whole other discussion. Chip implantation and whether or not people would be okay with that.

Mónica Freitas, it's the same with any tech! They all get swarmed by trolls. The metaverse won't be any different.

Mónica Freitas, I agree with Jack Boreham. I think it's inevitable. Trolls appear everywhere. I see how it can be damaging, and you can try to prevent it, but in the end, you can't fully stop it.

Jack Boreham, Sara Pinto, are there any measures you think could be implemented to reduce online trolls? More robust community policies, better education on the subject...?

Mónica Freitas, maybe having moderators or having verification factors, like on Tinder. It leaves a smaller margin for people who are there just to troll and mock people. Do you agree?

Sara Pinto, I had never thought of including facial verification but that's smart. It doesn't stop trolling but it tracks trolls. I'd also like for platforms to have more clear guidelines on online behaviour and real sanctions for those abusing those guidelines. For instance, TikTok's guidelines are very strange - they don't seem to make sense and there is a lot of pick and choose. I wish these were revised.

Mónica Freitas, could you give an example of a guideline for TikTok?
The point will always be that we may not fully stop trolls, but we can make it harder for them with supervision.

Sara Pinto, let me correct myself: it's not as much the guidelines but how they're enforced. For instance, one guideline is that you're not allowed to spread hate speech. However, you see a lot of wrongly enforcements of this guideline: you see feminist accounts getting banned because they commented on women's experience in a men's world but then creators spreading racism, misogyny, or LGBTQ+ discrimination go unchecked - a reflection of TikTok creators?

Sara Pinto, agreed. Anything that can make a difficult trolling is a good measure.

Mónica Freitas, I see. Seems like their efforts are turned to the wrong side and are improper. I think this might be an issue since everything is automated, so I'm not sure they actually go through the content to see if it fits their guidelines properly.

Sara Pinto, I read an article recently that talked about using AI to decrease this sort of bias. However, there are also other sources stating that it wouldn't work as AI is biased itself because it is built by humans. What do you think?

Mónica Freitas , that makes a lot of sense. AI would consider improper what we say it's improper. It can easily go wrong.

Sara Pinto, exactly. That begs the question, could it be that having a diverse group of people from distinct backgrounds building an AI would prove a fairer solution?

Mónica Freitas, I'm not sure, but I'm skeptical about that. I think it would have to be quite a large group and even so, not sure if it's a viable option. This is all about probabilities, and I think the probability to find such diverse group that can project to AI all the different ideas, is quite low.

Sara Pinto, interesting. I'm still optimistic. I think we have the means to make AI as diverse and fair as possible. It's simply a matter of want.