You probably didn’t know that the metaverse would become a sexual harassment tool, despite all of the excitement surrounding it. A woman working as a beta tester on Meta’s Horizon Worlds has alleged that she was groped by a stranger.

The Verge in America reported this incident just over a month ago. The report claims that the woman, who is not named, claimed that her avatar had been groped and manipulated by someone else. Other users also supported the incident. Blog post:

It’s not a joke to harass someone on the internet. But, being in VR makes it more real.

As reported by BTC PEERS, Meta’s Horizon Worlds became open to all US and Canadian adults last week. The social VR experience platform arguably mirror’s Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse.

Meta initiated an internal investigation following the reporting of the incident. According to MIT Technology Review (now Meta), the incident occurred November 26, with the woman writing a December 1 post. The results from Meta’s investigation showed that the victim had not turned on a safety feature designed to prevent harassment on the platform at the time of the incident.

Commenting on the issue, Vivek Sharma, Meta’s VP of Horizon, described it as “absolutely unfortunate.” On the flip side, he told The Verge that it was good feedback in order to make the Safe Zone blocking tool “trivially easy and findable.”

The Safe Zone feature prevents other users from interfacing with that user once it is activated.

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