Harassment has long been considered a severe social issue and a culturally contextualized construct. More recently, understanding and mitigating emerging harassment in social Virtual Reality (VR) has become a growing research area in HCI and CSCW. Based on the perspective of harassment in the U.S. culture, in this paper we identify new characteristics of online harassment in social VR using 30 in-depth interviews. We especially attend to how people who are already considered marginalized in the gaming and virtual worlds contexts (e.g., women, LGBTQ, and ethnic minorities) experience such harassment. As social VR is still a novel technology, our proactive approach highlights embodied harassment as an emerging but understudied form of harassment in novel online social spaces. Our critical review of social VR users' experiences of harassment and recommendations to mitigate such harassment also extends the current conceptualization of online harassment in CSCW. We therefore contribute to the active prevention of future harassment in nuanced online environments, platforms, and experiences.
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Towards Leveraging AI-based Moderation to Address Emergent Harassment in Social Virtual Reality
Extensive HCI research has investigated how to prevent and mitigate harassment in virtual spaces, particularly by leveraging human-based and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based moderation. However, social Virtual Reality (VR) constitutes a novel social space that faces both intensified harassment challenges and a lack of consensus on how moderation should be approached to address such harassment. Drawing on 39 interviews with social VR users with diverse backgrounds, we investigate the perceived opportunities and limitations for leveraging AI-based moderation to address emergent harassment in social VR, and how future AI moderators can be designed to enhance such opportunities and address limitations. We provide the first empirical investigation into re-envisioning AI’s new roles in innovating content moderation approaches to better combat harassment in social VR. We also highlight important principles for designing future AI-based moderation incorporating user-human-AI collaboration to achieve safer and more nuanced online spaces.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2112878
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10462213
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 17
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Online harassment against women - particularly in gaming and virtual worlds contexts - remains a salient and pervasive issue, and arguably reflects the systems of offline structural oppression to control women’s bodies and rights in today’s world. Harassment in social Virtual Reality (VR) is also a growing new frontier of research in HCI and CSCW, particularly focusing on marginalized users such as women. Based on interviews with 31 women users of social VR, our findings present women’s experiences of harassment risks in social VR as compared to harassment targeting women in pre-existing, on-screen online gaming and virtual worlds, along with strategies women employ to manage harassment in social VR with varying degrees of success. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on harassment in social VR by highlighting how women’s marginalization online and offline impact their perceptions of and strategies to mitigate harassment in this unique space. It also provides a critical reflection on women’s mitigation strategies and proposes important implications to rethink social VR design to better prevent harassment against women and other marginalized communities in the future metaverse.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581090
