Protecting children as they spend years in virtual worlds
Summary
In New Zealand, tech giants agreed to “self-regulate” to reduce harmful online content, making a move that critics said dodged the alternative of government regulation. The development of the UK’s Online Safety Bill is still ongoing, and while it applies to immersive technologies, including the metaverse, it currently focuses on published user-generated content rather than activity. Children will engage live with individuals who may seek to persuade the child to take part in unhealthy or dangerous behaviours, circumnavigating the need for content to be published online in a regulated environment. One viable solution is the establishment of an Online Harms Safety Centre (OHSC) to orchestrate the collective skills and capacity of organisations across the response landscape, allowing them to play to their areas of expertise as part of a wider view of the end-to-end threat. This would benefit from having industry and third sector organisations “inside the tent”, acting as the central coordination entity for all activity across the online harms landscape, including preventing child sexual abuse and exploitation, extremism, intolerance, self-harm and suicide-related material.