Vice Highlights Second Life in Story on Virtual Pedophilia

Vice, an online media outlet which gets about 55 million monthly visits and is generally considered the most influential news source among millenials, has a fascinating if inherently disturbing feature on the role of virtual sex in the lives of real pedophiles. Predictably, Second Life's centrality in that activity is featured. Snip:

The free-to-download platform is Aladdin's genie in pixel form, able to manifest anything at a user's whim: G-rated towns lined with maple trees and French boutiques, in-game foot races benefiting IRL cancer foundations, hellscapes where women in Juicy Couture tracksuits noisily craft anvils, and, famously, secluded zones attracting sexual deviants of all proclivities. Its edifices and landscapes aren't Second Life's only venues for boundless exploration: So customizable are Second Life avatars that a player could don a cleft chin and Armani-style suit by day and by night, hulking paws, green fur, and exaggerated, functioning genitalia. Predictably, Second Life became a hub for fetishists around the world—including pedophiles.

The subject is ripe for study by psychologists and other academics. I hope Linden Lab and other virtual reality developers also give it a read, because it explores the dark side of fully-unregulated user generated content and highlights the moment when SL started earning its "weird sex" reputation:

At the peak of Second Life's popularity, Jason Farrell, a reporter from Sky News, was tipped off to a playground hidden behind the wall of a virtual shopping center; it was called "Wonderland," either with deep irony or cutting earnestness, depending on whom you asked. According to Farrell's 2007 report, child avatars—typically manned by residents over 18—would bide their time on swings and slides until users approached them offering money in exchange for sex. Torture, rape, and maiming were just some of the items on the menu there. News of this "virtual pedophile ring" led to a domino effect of shock and horror covered by news outlets worldwide.

In one of the many related reports, a German news station aired a clip to illustrate the kind of indiscretions going down right under Linden Lab's nose: a scene that involved a young girl naked and on top of an older bald man in his bedroom. A toy merry-go-round spun nearby. For added pathos, the news station filmed Peter Vogt, a senior public prosecutor in Halle who handled cases of child pornography, watching the clip. Horrified, he told the reporter, "It really makes no difference if this is a fictitious or a real event, when the objective elements of child abuse are given." Ethically speaking, many would agree.

Financially, there was no doubt: A reputation as a hub for furry sex and pedophilia isn't exactly a tech company's ticket to the big bucks. In response, Linden Lab cracked down on "age-play," sexual role-play between a child avatar and an adult avatar, generally both operated by IRL adults. Lucas*, a former Second Life age-player, understood Linden Lab's decision—they have to preserve their reputation to stay afloat as a business—but still considered it an infringement on his "free speech."

As I explained last year, Second Life is still saddled by this reputation (and this new Vice story will only help renew and solidify it). And as Twitter just discovered during Gamergate (and Linden Lab learned the hard way), when a private company enables extreme free expression without any thought of the social ramifications, it puts its own brand and larger userbase in jeopardy.

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Comments

[zz bottom]

I do think that Bethesda name is much more spoken off then SL in that article and in no way i read any thing implying that Sl was a paradise for pedophiles but the opposite as a community.
And
Quoting:
when a private company enables extreme free expression without any thought of the social ramifications, it puts its own brand and larger userbase in jeopardy.
Unquote.
That is a rational thought of someone that really never lived under a regime that does not allow freedom of speech.

[Clara Seller]

Honestly, I thought that SL has done a pretty good job with this kind of thing. Seems this blog has sliced and diced this subject over and over.

Maybe it's a good idea for Sansar to really clamp down hard and be like a North Korean Disney. I'm totally okay with that. I think it will be incredibly lucrative because most people spending $600.00 on an Oculus are probably looking for restrictions.

[Iggy]

SL's bad rep among many non-SLers draws eyeballs. That's why this story got any traction.

In my more Vonnegut moments, I imagine Wall Street's Masters of the Universe, trading in their pin-stripes for school-girl and tentacle-monster outfits. High above lower Manhattan's rush-hour roar, a very strange afterwork party begins...

Humans are curious monkeys with often runaway glands. I'm not defending pedophilia, but consenting adults have always done bizarro things behind closed doors. Or out in the open. And to 20-somethings, like those Vice readers, older folk having sex is inherently bizarro. Apparently Vice needed to pump up their story that way.

I do wonder if the sex is not in Sansar, will it thrive?

[Ezra]

"As I explained last year, Second Life is still saddled by this reputation (and this new Vice story will only help renew and solidify it)."

No, the Vice story describes an old problem, then immediately describes the solution Linden Lab put in place. This is night and day from what you do; you'll link an Anshe Chung flying penis video and not bother to describe the countermeasures available then (rez rights) and everything that's been implemented since (content filtering, new ratings system). You should aspire to be as thorough and fair.

Second Life deserves a lot of the reputation it has, but thankfully there's journalists out there that bother to present progress since more sordid times.

[Dirran Skytower]

Second Life has managed to mess up most use cases.

How many thriving SLEEK users are there? How many SLEEKs were ever actually sold?

How many educational institutions remained or returned through the off again on again discount fiasco?

How many regions are locked up in under the counter discounts with large landowners that are unavailable to individual users? What is the actual cost SL incurs in providing a region and what is the relationship to the price charged to undiscounted users?

I believe the phone system is occasionally used by criminals. There is no call to shut down the phone lines in response.

Linden Lab did probably move too slowly on virtual child abuse but it banned the practice almost a decade ago. As early as 1992 the US supreme court excluded child pornography from the ambit of free speech because it is inherently exploitive, so it is not as if the company could argue in 2007 that virtual child abuse was free expression. Continuing to refer to virtual child abuse as 'age-play' is probably part of the problem.

The real problem this blog post identifies is not occasional critics of Second Life in the media, but that the company's reaction to these critics is to stare into space. And that this blog's invariable response is to hint at illegitimising one of the few use cases the platform actually supports reasonably well.

Anyone who thinks, as this blog appears to argue, that SL could survive as an adult content free zone may care to search You Tube for Elderly Man River by Stan Freberg.

[Former SL resident]

Linden Lab enforces the ageplay rule so well it does not even care to check whether an abuse report is based on fact or created out of spite, and they ridiculously allow for a terminated account's owner to appeal only to reinstate their decision and close the account for good.

No wonder the media continue to put the pedophilia stigma on Second Life. When a company earns a bad reputation and does not do anything except humiliate their customers and ruin their own reputation with no right to appeal, the stigma is more than well deserved.

I personally remember what LL did when the scandal was brought up in 2006: first they defended the right of their residents (all adults) to do whatever they pleased (and that included canninbalism, shooting, bestiality, you name it), then reversed their decision and decided to punish only one particular category, the age players, leaving all the others alone, in the hope that appeasing some vocal moralists would create more business but effectively conceding they were in the wrong. There is nothing they could, can or shall do to prevent the stigma to stay forever. And I would venture to suggest this is probably one of the secret reasons for replacing SL with Project Sansar.