“Funny Club Penguin 1” by car23trey10cp is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.
Since Mark Zuckerberg revealed the launch of the Metaverse in October 2021, controversy around the nascent technology has continued to proliferate public discourse. Since Metaverse users have the potential to obscure whole aspects of their identity, such as avatar appearance and personality, governing its users will prove to be more difficult than anticipated. These difficulties in governance are cyclical and reflect similar concerns over the genesis of the original Internet in the 90s. In 2005, a prototype to the first stages of social media was revealed through the platform Club Penguin that focused on garnering an adolescent audience. Since the Club Penguin moderated language on account of the innocence of its users, language and content regulation in the Metaverse should be regulated on account of different users and their susceptibilities. However, monitoring the Metaverse will prove to be more difficult since its users are anticipated to be of all ages.
Olivia Saunders’ Example
Fortnite being an example of the Metaverse following the web 2.0
An example of how the metaverse already exists among us is Fortnite. Fortnite began as a video game and has excelled to become a place where people use it solely to socialise virtually instead of in reality. It enables individuals to create new identities, interacting with others through an identity that doesn’t reflect or is true to who they are in the real world. This is something we already see in social media however with the Metaverse progressing it will become so much more intense. Trying to govern a virtual world that typically runs and exists based on false identities and anonymous people is difficult. The site and virtual world cant recognise who is children or if someone is impersonating another, it loses all touch of the truth.
