Hair-Raising Story of Second Life Stalking Soon to Be Replicated in VR-Based Worlds

From /SecondLife comes this incredibly disturbing story of some SLers who were ruthlessly stalked in Second Life and into the real world:

I reported this jerk, so did all her friends. He was ignored and his carbon copy accounts blocked. So he made more. Many more. He copied outfits, displaynames and profiles and would hang out at places where my friend would hang out sending nasty IM's to people calling them names, fag, tranny etc...

He used several alts to monitor the main public hangouts, we tried in vain to pattern match accounts on the region preceding everyone near by a victim getting messaged. He tracked my friend down RL and sent a message about her kids and their school. She finally folded and quit SL. He wasn't finished with me, and started using single use rezzed prims to send me scripted IM's calling me and the people around me names. These could not be blocked, every message came from a brand new object rezzed somewhere in SL. A few times we got to the objects location just as he logged off and with a lot of messages managed to get the main copy cat accounts banned from social sims. We made a blog and logged every incident and sent that to Linden Lab staff. My friend went to the police, they told her to stop using the internet.

There's a lot more to this, and it concludes with this ominous warning worth emphasizing: "There are major issues in how abuse and harassment are handled and no one at Linden Lab seems prepared to step up. Be careful what you reveal about yourself in SL because no one has your back."

Linden Lab, by the way, is hardly the only tech company struggling to deal with this variety of stalking -- Twitter, for example, is a much larger company, and after years of trying, still has profound difficulty dealing with it. Incidences like these -- or the one I reported last year, in which a woman was stalked in real life by someone who reverse image searched her SL avatar -- convince me that the next generation of VR-connected virtual worlds have a massive problem on their hands.

To be sure, many SLers report no experiences of harassment at all, and even argue that the world's architecture itself discourages such behavior:

"I think the very reason the harassment issue is not a huge problem in SL is that actually creating your own avatar and not looking like a newbie is something that goes beyond abilities of the average troll," as melponeme_k argued last week. "This is why WOW, other games and simple VRs like Altspace are treacherous. The avatars are disposable and cheap. Where in SL you are your avatar, it is your calling card, and your proof of investment in the world. New avatars are so easy to pick out and easy to avoid. Female users are quick to mod their avatars and move rapidly into fashion forward circles in the process creating community around themselves. Quite simply Second Life empowers female users."

That's also true, but that only means most dedicated SLers are mostly immune to random, casual trolls -- but not against truly dedicated, sociopathic stalkers. And what happens when Project Sansar, High Fidelity, and all the other VR-connected social worlds go online, and stalkers are given the chance to virtually grope their victims in ways that are profoundly damaging?

Image credit: "Adam harassing Eve", scene from the SL-based movie Paradise Lost

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Comments

[Test]

I don't think that Linden Lab is struggling with this problem. Some people using Second Life are struggling with it, but I doubt Linden Lab has any resources devoted to this problem. I don't think they're even trying to help people who are dealing with this kind of harassment. There are a lot of borderline cases out there, and we couldn't expect them to get in the middle of every little argument, but it wouldn't be very difficult for them to address the worst of the worst cases, people who are creating multiple accounts to conduct overt targeted harassment of others. There are committed, serial abusers in Second Life that have been repeatedly reported by dozens or hundreds of people, and no action is ever taken against them. It really wouldn't look good if LL came out and said that there no longer is a governance team, so I guess they just keep telling people to file ARs, and then ignore them. I would actually love to be wrong about there no longer being a governance team that responds to ARs, but if there is, I would wonder what in the world they've been doing.

[Carlos Loff]

I it my impressiuon or we can mute and ban from land other people on SL and when they get another 30 accounts we can 30 times mute and ban them, just like a routine (altough sad but anyway ritual routine) and go on with our lives ???

[K Flanagan]

The derender and mute resident is effective as well.