Source:https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2023\/04\/18\/meta-opens-up-its-social-vr-platform-horizon-worlds-to-teens\/<\/a><\/br>
\nMeta opens up its social VR space Horizon Worlds to teens<\/br>
\n2023-04-18 21:44:20<\/br><\/p>\n

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Meta announced<\/a> today that it\u2019s opening up Horizon Worlds to teen users in the U.S. and Canada, after previously restricting the social VR platform to users 18 years of age and above. As part of the expansion, the company says it\u2019s introducing a set of age-appropriate protections and safety defaults.<\/p>\n

The move comes as lawmakers and children\u2019s rights activists<\/a> had urged Meta to abandon its plans to open up the platform to young users.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s announcement doesn\u2019t come as a surprise, as a leaked memo<\/a> revealed back in February that Meta planned to open up access<\/a> to Horizon Worlds to users aged 13 to 17. At the time, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Ed Markey (D-MA) wrote a\u00a0letter<\/a> to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging him to halt the plans, arguing that giving teens access to \u201cdigital space rife with potential harms\u201d would be a bad idea.<\/p>\n

Meta says it has invested in new safety features including back-end protections and parental supervision tools that allow parents and teens to help manage the experience before making Worlds available to this age group. The company says it\u2019s rolling out Horizon Worlds to teens slowly so that it can carefully examine usage before expanding more broadly.<\/p>\n

Teens can choose who they follow and who can follow them back, and their profiles are automatically set to private, which means they can approve or decline anyone who requests to follow them. By default, Meta also won\u2019t show a teen\u2019s active status and their Horizon Worlds location to other people, but these settings can be changed, as teens can choose whether their connections can see if they\u2019re active online and which public world or event they\u2019re in.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe use content ratings to ensure teens have an age-appropriate experience within Worlds,\u201d Meta wrote in a blog post<\/a>. \u201cFor example, mature world and event ratings prevent teens from finding, seeing, or entering spaces that contain mature content<\/a>. Our policies prohibit teens from publishing mature worlds or events. Worlds violating this policy will be removed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meta will also transform the voices of people a teen doesn\u2019t know into garbled sounds. The teens voice will be garbled too, so people they don\u2019t know can\u2019t hear them.<\/p>\n

In addition, Meta says it will limit interaction between teens and adults by not displaying any adults a teen doesn\u2019t know in their \u201cpeople you might know\u201d list.<\/p>\n

As for parents, they will be able to set up Worlds parental supervision by inviting their teen to connect though Meta\u2019s Family Center<\/a> offering. Once this is set up, parents will be able to see, adjust and lock safety features. Parents will also be able to see who their teen follows and who follows their teen. The controls allow parents to see how much time teens have spent in Worlds and also block their teens from using Worlds altogether.<\/p>\n

In days leading up the announcement,<\/span> many children\u2019s rights activists had asked Meta to abandon its plans<\/a> to attract young teens onto the social VR platform, worrying that doing so would expose them to sexually explicit and homophobic content.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meta has had problems both with keeping users protected while using the platform. After its initial rollout, some users reported being<\/a>\u00a0groped<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0sexually harassed<\/a> in Horizon Worlds. To address this, Meta later rolled out a \u201cpersonal boundary<\/a>\u201d feature. Much of the platform can feel like a free-for-all since it can be difficult to moderate speech-based interactions on a massive scale.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth noting that although Horizon Worlds technically<\/em> was restricted to adults prior to this expansion, many people<\/a> reported that the platform was overrun<\/a> with young users who were able to easily bypass the age limit for the platform.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Science, Tech, Technology<\/br>
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\nSource:https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2023\/04\/18\/meta-opens-up-its-social-vr-platform-horizon-worlds-to-teens\/<\/a><\/br><\/br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source:https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2023\/04\/18\/meta-opens-up-its-social-vr-platform-horizon-worlds-to-teens\/ Meta opens up its social VR space Horizon Worlds to teens 2023-04-18 21:44:20 Meta announced today that it\u2019s opening up Horizon Worlds to teen users in the U.S. and Canada, after previously restricting the social VR platform to users 18 years of age and above. As part of the expansion, the company says it\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,17,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","category-tech","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"\n