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Harassment in virtual reality

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Harassment in virtual reality is abusive, threatening or unwanted behavior directed at people in shared virtual reality (VR) environments, most often in social VR applications where users meet as avatars and talk over live voice chat. It includes verbal abuse and hate speech, simulated touching or groping of another user's avatar, invasion of personal space, stalking, the display of graphic content, and the targeting of children. In a 2019 interview study of 25 social VR users, researchers at Oculus VR wrote that harassment can be exacerbated by features such as synchronous voice chat, heightened feelings of presence and embodiment, and avatar movements that can feel like violations of personal space, and found that embodiment and presence made harassment feel more intense.[1]

The problem drew wide attention in October 2016, when a player described being virtually groped in the multiplayer mode of the archery game QuiVr and the game's developers responded with new protective controls.[2][3] Since then, personal space boundaries, mute and block tools, and reporting systems have become standard features of social VR platforms. Researchers, child-safety campaigners and policymakers have continued to debate whether those tools, platform moderation and existing laws are adequate, particularly for women, minority groups and children.[4]

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Checked every cited paper (authors, venue, year, DOI, findings) and every news, platform and policy source for dates, quotes and figures. About review dates.

Forms of harassment

There is no single agreed definition of harassment in VR. Blackwell and colleagues found that their participants' definitions of online harassment were "subjective and highly personal", which they identified as a major difficulty for enforcing rules at the platform or application level. The experiences their participants described fell largely into three categories:[1]

Category Examples given in the study
Verbal harassment Personal insults, hateful slurs
Physical harassment Simulated touching or grabbing of another user's avatar
Environmental harassment Displaying graphic content on a shared screen

The same study found that, because VR offers few but salient identity cues, the signals that are available (for example gender or dialect revealed by a user's voice) make some people more likely to be harassed than others. Participants also distinguished between newcomers who broke unwritten norms without realizing it and users who set out to cause harm.[1]

In a 2022 study based on 30 in-depth interviews conducted in October and November 2019, Guo Freeman and colleagues at Clemson University described four characteristics of harassment across social VR platforms: physical behaviors meant to disturb others (such as running around, shouting or blocking another user's view), forced attention made possible by the heavy use of voice chat, invasion of personal space through embodied interaction, and harassment of adults by children. Seventeen of their participants identified as members of groups often marginalized in tech spaces, such as women, LGBTQ people and ethnic minorities. These participants reported that the combination of avatar design and voice made their gender and ethnicity easier to identify, and the authors also found signs of a higher risk of stalking, including outside social VR, because of personal cues revealed during embodied interaction.[5]

Observational work has found similar patterns. Nazanin Sabri and colleagues attended 100 scheduled events in AltspaceVR, Horizon Worlds and Rec Room for a paper presented at CHI 2023. They identified 13 distinct types of potentially harmful behavior enabled by real-time voice, embodied interaction and platform features, witnessed potential harm at 45% of the events, and found that moderators addressed only 24% of those incidents.[6] A survey of 215 adult social VR users published in the journal Virtual Reality in 2026 found verbal harassment to be the most frequent category. Physical harassment was less frequent but produced the most polarized ratings, with more respondents than in other categories rating it either not harmful at all or extremely harmful. Women did not report harassment more often than men, but rated it as more harmful.[7]

Embodiment, presence and impact

Much of the research attributes the particular character of VR harassment to embodiment and presence. Blackwell and colleagues found that embodiment and presence in VR spaces made harassment feel more intense, while the ephemeral nature of virtual spaces and the lack of standardized controls across independent applications made unwanted behavior hard to escape or report. A few of their participants thought that embodiment and presence could also reduce harassment by increasing empathy for other users.[1] Freeman and colleagues pointed to full-body tracked avatars, synchronous voice conversation and simulated touching and grabbing as features that may lead to more harassment, with potentially more harmful consequences, than in earlier 3D virtual worlds and online games.[5]

In a 2024 policy review, Verity McIntosh and Catherine Allen describe "phantom touch", a sensation frequently discussed by social VR users in which a person perceives a touch on their body that matches a simulated touch in VR. They note that it is largely under-researched in formal settings. The review also addresses the common question of why targets do not simply remove the headset, citing preliminary research that rapid disengagement from VR under stress can provoke panic or dissociation, and noting that the question ignores trauma responses such as freezing.[4]

Meta executive Andrew Bosworth made a related point in a BBC interview in late 2021: "It could feel a lot more real to me, if you were being abusive towards me because it feels a lot more like physical space." He said users would have "a great deal more power" over their environments: "If I were to mute you, you would cease to exist for me and your ability to do harm to me is immediately nullified."[8]

Later studies have looked at particular groups and variables. Kelsea Schulenberg, Guo Freeman and colleagues interviewed 31 women who use social VR and compared their experiences of harassment risk with harassment of women in on-screen games and virtual worlds, along with the strategies they used to manage it.[9] A 2024 mixed-methods study surveyed 166 VR users and interviewed 18 social VR users on how the appearance of a potential harasser's avatar affects how users perceive sexual harassment and how they respond.[10] A paper accepted to the ACM ASSETS 2026 accessibility conference combined a literature review with an online survey of 67 people with disabilities and identified 19 types of harm in five categories, arguing that VR's realism and the vulnerability tied to disability identity can intensify their impact.[11]

History

Precursors in text-based worlds

Disputes over abuse in shared virtual spaces predate headset-based VR. In an account first published in The Village Voice in December 1993, writer Julian Dibbell described how a character named Mr. Bungle used a programmed "doll" to make other players' characters appear to perform sexual acts in LambdaMOO, a text-based multi-user dimension (MUD). One of the victims asked that Mr. Bungle be "toaded", which in that type of MUD erases the character and deletes the account, and the request set off a community debate about rules and governance.[12]

Early social VR (2016-2018)

In 2016 an all-female team at AltspaceVR designed a "personal space bubble" that made other avatars disappear and become inaudible when they came closer than about an arm's length, and made the user invisible and inaudible to them in turn. MIT Technology Review reported in March 2017 that the bubble was on by default but could be turned off, that the company had a human "concierge" on duty around the clock to take reports, and that High Fidelity had launched its own bubble early that year along with mute and block features.[13]

On 20 October 2016 a writer using the pseudonym Jordan Belamire published an essay on Medium describing playing QuiVr on her brother-in-law's HTC Vive. In the game's multiplayer mode, where her avatar looked identical to the other players' and her voice was "the only indication of my femaleness", another player's "floating hand approached my body, and he started to virtually rub my chest". She wrote that he kept chasing her after she told him to stop and turned away.[2] The game's developers responded in an editorial published by UploadVR on 25 October 2016. QuiVr already had a "Personal Bubble" setting that made other players' hands disappear near a user's face; the team extended the fade to the whole body and added a "power gesture", performed by bringing the hands together, pulling both triggers and pulling the hands apart, that fades nearby players from view and mutes their voices. The developers proposed that the VR industry adopt a single cross-platform gesture that players could rely on as "their call to a safe space".[3][14] Co-creator Aaron Stanton told CNNMoney, as quoted by Time: "Our first response was, 'Let's make sure this never happens again.'"[15] Speaking to MIT Technology Review in 2021, Stanton said the gesture's use had not been tracked and was probably low, and that he regretted not pushing harder for industry-wide adoption.[16]

At IEEE VR 2017, Ketaki Shriram and Raz Schwartz presented a study of harassment behavior in social VR.[17] As summarized by Freeman and colleagues, two of seven women and 21 of 99 men in that survey reported having been harassed in social VR, and 42% of respondents said they had seen someone else harassed.[5] McIntosh and Allen cite a 2018 survey of more than 600 users in which 49% of regular female VR users reported sexual harassment or abuse in virtual social spaces.[4]

In January 2018, after a surge of new users, Oculus designer Katie Chironis posted a recording of gendered harassment she had experienced in VRChat. The developer then published an open letter saying that a trained moderation team monitored the platform and that self-moderation tools were in development; in the meantime it pointed users to Mute/Block, a Mute All option and a moderation report form.[18]

Horizon Worlds and the "metaverse" debate (2021-2022)

On 26 November 2021 a beta tester of Meta's Horizon Worlds reported that a stranger had groped her, writing in the Horizon Worlds beta testing group on Facebook that being in VR "adds another layer that makes the event more intense" and that "there were other people there who supported this behavior". Meta's internal review concluded that she should have used the Safe Zone tool. Horizon vice president Vivek Sharma called the incident "absolutely unfortunate", and a Meta spokesperson said "it's never a user's fault if they don't use all the features we offer."[16]

On 30 December 2021 the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published research on VRChat, which it described as the most reviewed social app in Facebook's VR metaverse. Its researchers reported that users, including minors, were exposed to abusive behavior every seven minutes, and identified 100 potential violations of Facebook's VR policies in 11 hours and 30 minutes of recordings, including minors exposed to graphic sexual content, bullying and sexual harassment. CCDH said only 51 of the incidents met Facebook's criteria for reporting and that Facebook did not respond to any of those reports.[19]

In early February 2022 Nina Jane Patel told the Daily Mail that a group of male avatars had groped her in Horizon Venues, and Meta told the paper that it was sorry. The same BBC report quoted Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson describing male avatars surrounding and photographing her in Horizon Worlds.[8] Meta introduced its Personal Boundary feature on 4 February 2022, and on 16 February Microsoft removed AltspaceVR's open social hubs and made its Safety Bubble default for all users (see below).[20][21]

Platform safety tools

Personal space boundaries, mute, block and report functions are now common across social VR. McIntosh and Allen describe designers at Google and Meta drawing on Edward Hall's theory of proxemics, and note that personal space bubbles are now available in most social VR apps.[4] A 2019 CHI paper by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Kolesnichenko and Katherine Isbister, based on interviews with the creators of Rec Room, High Fidelity, VRChat, Mozilla Hubs, AltspaceVR, AnyLand and Facebook Spaces, identified tactics for shaping social norms and mitigating harassment as one of four design considerations, alongside aesthetics of place, embodied affordances and social mechanics.[22]

Platform Tool Introduced Description
QuiVr Personal Bubble and power gesture October 2016 (extended) Other players' hands, and then whole avatars, fade when they reach toward a user; a two-handed gesture fades nearby players and mutes them[3]
AltspaceVR Personal space bubble, later Safety Bubble 2016; default for all users from 16 February 2022 Avatars closer than about an arm's length disappear and become inaudible; the service closed on 10 March 2023[13][21][23]
High Fidelity Personal space bubble Early 2017 Bubble with mute and block features[13]
Horizon Worlds Safe Zone and rolling capture Announced with the invite-only beta, August 2020 A protective space opened from the wrist menu, from which users can mute, block or report; the headset keeps the last few minutes of the session on a rolling basis so they can be attached to a report[24]
Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues Personal Boundary 4 February 2022 Stops other avatars' forward movement at almost 4 feet; adjustable from March 2022[20]
VRChat Safety and Trust system Ongoing Per-rank control over others' voices, avatars, shaders and effects; mute, block and Safe Mode[25]

Meta's August 2020 announcement of the Horizon beta said that after a user mutes, blocks or reports someone, a trained safety specialist who does not appear as an avatar may remotely observe and record the situation.[24] Meta's Personal Boundary was at first always on by default, which the company said would help set behavioral norms. A March 2022 update added three settings (on for people the user does not know, on for everyone, or off), with the more restrictive setting applying when two users meet, and a December 2023 update made approaching avatars fade faster and adjusted the barrier to make high fives easier.[20] Microsoft's February 2022 AltspaceVR changes removed the Campfire, News and Entertainment Commons hubs, where harassment had been an ongoing problem, automatically muted new attendees when they joined events, and announced that a Microsoft account would be required to use the app.[21] Microsoft shut AltspaceVR down on 10 March 2023.[23]

VRChat's Trust system assigns users ranks such as Visitor, New User, User, Known User and Trusted, earned through regular use of the platform. Its Safety menu lets each user decide, rank by rank, whether to hear other users' voices and see their avatars, shaders, particles and custom animations, through presets called Shield Levels. A Safe Mode shortcut disables all of these features for all users at once.[25]

Platform rules also address harassment directly. Meta's Code of Conduct for Virtual Experiences prohibits "Bullying, harassing, stalking, or hateful behavior", "Sexualizing, exploiting, or abusing minors" and "Any form of non-consensual intimate activity". It places primary responsibility for enforcement in closed experiences on their creators and administrators, and says Meta may act directly in cases of persistent or serious issues.[26]

Criticism of user-side tools

Critics argue that defensive tools place the burden on targets. McIntosh and Allen write that personal space bubbles "can also create an imbalance of power that favours the aggressor", since the target must configure safety features in advance or under pressure while persistent harassers face no comparable barrier. They add that reporting features can be hard to use while abuse is ongoing, and that platforms are not required by any regulator to disclose how they investigate reports or to tell complainants what action was taken.[4] University of Washington researcher Katherine Cross told MIT Technology Review in 2021 that shifting safety onto users was unfair: "The structural question is the big issue for me."[16] In a keynote at the GDC conference in March 2017, video game designer Raph Koster argued that companies needed to go beyond defensive tools by curating spaces and investigating and punishing bad behavior, for example with dedicated staff.[13] Blackwell and colleagues recommended facilitating consistent pro-social norms and supporting community-led governance as alternatives to purely top-down enforcement by platforms.[1]

Children

Children and adults share many social VR spaces. Divine Maloney, Guo Freeman and Andrew Robb studied interaction between minors, and between minors and adults, through participatory observation in social VR, reporting the work at CHI PLAY 2020.[27] Freeman's 2022 interview study found that children can also harass adults because of the complex interaction dynamics between age groups.[5]

In February 2022 a BBC News researcher posing as a 13-year-old girl used VRChat, which had a minimum age rating of 13 and could be downloaded from the Meta Quest store without age verification. She reported witnessing grooming, sexual material, racist insults and a rape threat. Andy Burrows, head of online child safety policy at the NSPCC, called the app "dangerous by design, because of oversight and neglect", and Meta said it had tools that let players block other users and was looking to make safety improvements.[28]

When Meta opened Horizon Worlds to teens aged 13 to 17 in the United States and Canada on 18 April 2023, it made teen profiles private by default, turned on a voice mode that garbles the voices of strangers and garbles the teen's voice for people they do not know, limited contact between adults and teens they are not connected to, blocked teens from mature worlds and events, and let parents see, adjust and lock settings such as voice mode and Personal Boundary.[29]

On 9 September 2025 two former Meta researchers, Jason Sattizahn and Cayce Savage, testified before the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. Sattizahn said that when his team found underage users of Meta's VR platform in Germany being pressed for sex acts and nude photos, "Meta demanded that we erase any evidence of such dangers that we saw." Savage said Meta was aware that many children used its VR platform. Meta called the claims "nonsense", saying they were based on "selectively leaked internal documents that were picked specifically to craft a false narrative."[30]

Law and policy

In January 2024 Euronews reported that British police were investigating a case in which the avatar of a girl, allegedly under 16, had been "sexually attacked" by a group of strangers in a VR game. A senior officer told the Daily Mail that "There is an emotional and psychological impact on the victim that is longer-term than any physical injuries." Authorities were concerned that prosecution might prove impossible because existing law defines sexual assault as non-consensual physical touching.[31] Home Secretary James Cleverly told LBC: "I know it is easy to dismiss this as being not real, but the whole point of these virtual environments is they are incredibly immersive." Donna Jones, chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, said the laws needed updating because they "have not kept pace with the risks of harm".[4][31]

McIntosh and Allen argue that many legal frameworks distinguish "content" abuses (such as sharing abusive text, images or video) from physical "contact" abuses, and that there is little legislative provision for abuse among co-present people in convincing simulated environments. They suggest that governments consider a third category, "conduct", to cover harassment and abuse in virtual environments even where there is no physical contact or production of content, and that they clarify the legal accountability of people acting through avatars and the responsibility of platforms for protecting users.[4] In the 2026 survey by Chen and colleagues, bans were the most supported response to harassment, but respondents also expressed strong support for legal action.[7]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Lindsay Blackwell, Nicole Ellison, Natasha Elliott-Deflo, Raz Schwartz (2019-11). "Harassment in Social Virtual Reality: Challenges for Platform Governance". Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 3, no. CSCW, article 100. ACM. doi:10.1145/3359202. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359202. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Jordan Belamire (2016-10-20). "My First Virtual Reality Groping". Athena Talks (Medium). https://web.archive.org/web/2016/https://medium.com/athena-talks/my-first-virtual-reality-sexual-assault-2330410b62ee. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "Dealing With Harassment in VR". UploadVR. 2016-10-25. https://uploadvr.com/dealing-with-harassment-in-vr. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Verity McIntosh, Catherine Allen (2024-12-05). "What do policymakers need to know about harassment in the metaverse?". Frontiers in Virtual Reality, vol. 5. doi:10.3389/frvir.2024.1443384. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2024.1443384. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Guo Freeman, Samaneh Zamanifard, Divine Maloney, Dane Acena (2022-04). "Disturbing the Peace: Experiencing and Mitigating Emerging Harassment in Social Virtual Reality". Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 6, no. CSCW1, article 85. ACM. doi:10.1145/3512932. https://doi.org/10.1145/3512932. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  6. ↑ Nazanin Sabri, Bella Chen, Annabelle Teoh, Steven P. Dow, Kristen Vaccaro, Mai ElSherief (2023-04-19). "Challenges of Moderating Social Virtual Reality". Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM. doi:10.1145/3544548.3581329. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581329. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Qijia Chen, Andrea Bellucci, Qunfang Wu, Giulio Jacucci (2026-05-19). "Harassment in social virtual reality: frequency, harmfulness, and governance responses". Virtual Reality, vol. 30, no. 3, article 139. Springer. doi:10.1007/s10055-026-01388-1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-026-01388-1. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Meta moves to tackle creepy behaviour in virtual reality". BBC News. 2022-02-04. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60247542. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  9. ↑ Kelsea Schulenberg, Guo Freeman, Lingyuan Li, Catherine Barwulor (2023-09-28). ""Creepy Towards My Avatar Body, Creepy Towards My Body": How Women Experience and Manage Harassment Risks in Social Virtual Reality". Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 7, no. CSCW2. ACM. doi:10.1145/3610027. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610027. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  10. ↑ Xuetong Wang, Ziyan Wang, Mingmin Zhang, Kangyou Yu, Pan Hui, Mingming Fan (2024-11-07). "Avatar Appearance and Behavior of Potential Harassers Affect Users' Perceptions and Response Strategies in Social Virtual Reality (VR): A Mixed-Methods Study". Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 8, no. CSCW2. ACM. doi:10.1145/3686934. https://doi.org/10.1145/3686934. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  11. ↑ Xinran Adeline Li, Kexin Zhang, Yuhang Zhao, Yaxing Yao (2026-08-27). "Beyond Harassment: Exploring the Harm Experienced by People with Disabilities in Social Virtual Reality". arXiv. arXiv:2608.27390. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27390. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  12. ↑ Julian Dibbell. "A Rape in Cyberspace (Or TINYSOCIETY, and How to Make One)". juliandibbell.com. http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 Tom Simonite (2017-03-13). "The War on the Disturbingly Real Trolls in Virtual Reality". MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603746/the-war-on-the-disturbingly-real-trolls-in-virtual-reality/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  14. ↑ Cecilia D'Anastasio (2016-10-26). "VR Developers Add 'Superpower' To Their Game To Fight Harassment". Kotaku. https://kotaku.com/vr-developers-add-personal-bubble-to-their-game-to-fi-1788237241. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  15. ↑ Melissa Chan (2016-10-26). "Game Developer Saddened by Virtual Reality Sex Assault: 'This Must Never Happen Again'". Time. https://time.com/4545943/virtual-reality-sex-assault-developer/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Tanya Basu (2021-12-16). "The metaverse has a groping problem already". MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/16/1042516/the-metaverse-has-a-groping-problem/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  17. ↑ Ketaki Shriram, Raz Schwartz (2017). "All are welcome: Using VR ethnography to explore harassment behavior in immersive social virtual reality". 2017 IEEE Virtual Reality (VR), pp. 225-226. IEEE. doi:10.1109/VR.2017.7892258. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2017.7892258. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  18. ↑ Jamie Feltham (2018-01-11). "VRChat Dev Vows To Address 'Harmful' User Behavior In Open Letter". UploadVR. https://uploadvr.com/vrchat-dev-vows-address-harmful-users-open-letter/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  19. ↑ "New research shows Metaverse is not safe for kids". Center for Countering Digital Hate. 2021-12-30. https://www.counterharm.com/blog/new-research-shows-metaverse-is-not-safe-for-kids/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 Vivek Sharma (2022-02-04). "Introducing a Personal Boundary for Horizon Worlds and Venues". Meta Newsroom. Meta. https://about.fb.com/news/2022/02/personal-boundary-horizon/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 Igor Bonifacic (2022-02-16). "Microsoft shuts down AltspaceVR's social hubs to combat harassment". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-altspace-vr-safety-changes-172513629.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  22. ↑ Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Kolesnichenko, Katherine Isbister (2019-05-02). "Shaping Pro-Social Interaction in VR: An Emerging Design Framework". Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-12. ACM. doi:10.1145/3290605.3300794. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300794. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Scott Hayden (2023-03-09). "Microsoft is Shutting Down Pioneering Social VR Platform 'AltspaceVR' Tomorrow". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/microsoft-social-vr-xr-interface-layoffs/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 "Facebook Horizon Invite-Only Beta Is Ready For Virtual Explorers". Meta Quest Blog. Meta. 2020-08-27. https://www.meta.com/blog/facebook-horizon-invite-only-beta-is-ready-for-virtual-explorers/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 "VRChat Safety and Trust System". VRChat Documentation. VRChat Inc.. https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/vrchat-safety-and-trust-system. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  26. ↑ "Code of Conduct for Virtual Experiences". Meta Quest Help Center. Meta. https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/accounts/privacy-information-and-settings/conduct-in-vr-policy/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  27. ↑ Divine Maloney, Guo Freeman, Andrew Robb (2020-11-02). "A Virtual Space for All: Exploring Children's Experience in Social Virtual Reality". Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY '20), pp. 472-483. ACM. doi:10.1145/3410404.3414268. https://doi.org/10.1145/3410404.3414268. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  28. ↑ "Metaverse app allows kids into virtual strip clubs". BBC News. 2022-02-23. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60415317. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  29. ↑ "Welcoming Teens to Meta Horizon Worlds in the US and Canada". Meta Newsroom. Meta. 2023-04-18. https://about.fb.com/news/2023/04/horizon-worlds-teen-expansion-us-canada/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  30. ↑ Allison Mollenkamp (2025-09-09). "Whistleblowers tell Senate panel Meta hid VR harms". Roll Call. https://rollcall.com/2025/09/09/whistleblowers-tell-senate-panel-meta-hid-vr-harms/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  31. ↑ 31.0 31.1 Theo Farrant (2024-01-04). "British police launch first investigation into virtual rape in metaverse". Euronews. https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/01/04/british-police-launch-first-investigation-into-virtual-rape-in-metaverse. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
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