Meta Adds 18 Plus Tag To Horizon Worlds ‘Metaverse’
Up until now, anything of an adult kind was completely off limits for Mark Zuckerburg’s saccharine ‘Horizon Worlds’, a meeting place in VR which he and others see as the early prototype for the much hyped Metaverse vision. Well, we all know that the Metaverse aint going to get very far unless they embrace a little bit of tits and ass, and it seems that Zuckeburg may have finally grasped that reality. Or at least he’s edged a little closer in that direction, because this week he announced the addition of an optional 18 and up tag for users to mark their user generated worlds with. Although sex and complete nudity are still off-limits, many things formerly banned are now permitted.
Based on a Wayback Machine archive of Meta’s Horizon Mature Worlds Policy page from April, this means Meta is now allowing content that was previously banned. The page used to say that sexually suggestive content, depictions of “regulated goods or activities” like weed and alcohol, and graphically violent content were completely off-limits in Horizon Worlds. Now, you may be able to include those types of things in your world, as long as you mark it as mature.
There are, of course, still restrictions. Let’s break those down.
If you mark your word as mature, you can include “sexually suggestive” content, such as “near nudity, depictions of people in implied or suggestive positions, or an environment focused on activities that are overly suggestive.” However, you can’t do flat-out porn; “nudity, depictions of people in explicit positions, or content or worlds that are sexually provocative or implied” are still forbidden.
Source : TheVerge.com
The Metaverse is expected to be worth trillions of dollars in just a few years time, and whatever emerges as the ‘red light district’ will likely contribute a fair share of it. The danger for Zuckerberg and his Meta company is in leaving this to a rival company. It’s not so much that Meta need the revenue from x-rated activities in their world, but rather that another company with more liberal rules, may establish a more popular and dominant version of the Metaverse. At the same time, Meta decidedly do not want to bring the wrath of the morality police onto them, given all the scandals and media moral panics that have hit them (or their previous brand Facebook). Given this, it’s likely Zuckerberg is testing the waters and seeing how this modest relaxtion in the rules will work, and how it will be taken by the media and critics.
