SURROUNDED by men in a virtual strip club, Yinka Bokinni is hit by a barrage of sexual taunts, abuse and explicit images – all while claiming she is just 13 years old.
This lawless world is just a small taste of what the journalist experienced when she went undercover in the virtual reality network known as the Metaverse.
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The Dispatches presenter was left “shocked and overwhelmed” after posing as both a 22-year-old and a 13-year-old to uncover the horrors of the VR chat rooms for the Channel 4 documentary, which airs tonight.
She was repeatedly asked to have virtual sex, with one man attempting to ram a bottle in her avatar’s mouth, and another boasting: “I like little girls from the age of 9 to 12 – it’s just my thing.”
Horrific racial abuse and vile bullying were rife in almost every room she visited and, shockingly, no steps were taken to verify her age and stop her entering adult themed rooms – including a strip club and a room full of pornographic images.
“I was scarred by what I saw,” Yina tells The Sun.
“Within the first few minutes of putting on my VT headset, I witnessed racism, homophobia and explicit sexual behaviour.
“The worrying thing is that you’re so immersed in the experience that even I, as an undercover reporter, kept forgetting that I could just take my headset off.
“The culture of bullying that exists on these apps is horrific. I’m not a teenager, I’m an adult and I found it disturbing.
“If you’re a user who is vulnerable, isolated or young, you could easily be at risk of harm.”
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Sexual intimidation in minutes
The Metaverse, a network of 3D virtual worlds accessed through headsets, has been described as the future of social media by tech mogul Mark Zuckerburg, who recently changed the name of the company that owns Facebook to Meta.
Last year, tech companies pumped £8billion into the new platforms – with Apple and Fortnite planning to cash in – and eight million of the leading headset, Oculus, have now been sold.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate found users of VR Chat were exposed to abuse every seven minutes
Rape threats and racial abuse
As a prolific social media user, DJ and journalist Yinka, from South London, was interested in the new technology and wanted to investigate reports that the VR chatrooms were a haven for paedophiles and sexual predators.
“It had that feeling of the internet in its infancy, the early Reddit and YouTubes, a lawless place, a bit of a wild west,” she says.
“I did wonder if it was bad as some of the initial research suggested or whether people had done a deep dive in and really gone fishing, to paint it out to be super negative because we’re all scared of change.
“But I has just entered my first room when I was surrounded by male avatars who wwe sexually aggressive.
“People were demanding my social media handles, wanting me to join groups and trying to touch me. When I wouldn’t let them, they would try and kick me out of rooms. It’s so overwhelming.”
Using fake Facebook accounts, Yinka posed as 22-year-old Jade and 13-year-old Ivy in the popular platforms Rec Room and VR Chat.
When you know that there’s no repercussions or consequences, the things people will say and do are worrying
Yinka Bokinni
There were no ID or age verification checks and Yinka says adjusting the headset was more complicated than opening a fake account.
Although users enter the virtual spaces as avatars, real voices are used to interact.
Within seconds of entering a virtual club, Yinka’s adult avatar was surrounded by aggressive males persistently telling her to “turn off” her safety bubble – a setting which prevents other users from touching you.
One user, who called her by a racially abusive term, told her to “suck my d***”, while others asked shocking questions alluding to sexual assault.
“There was this one guy in the Rec Room club that had a wine bottle and was trying to stick it in my avatar’s mouth,” says Yinka.
“He was telling me to open my bubble and it was clearly sexual harassment.
“The brazenness of some of the users was shocking. In VR, if somebody tries to grab you, they have to physically put their hand out and grope the air, so they are doing that action in real life.
“But when you know that there’s no repercussions or consequences, the things people will say and do are worrying.”
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Underage users simulating sex with adult
What Yinka found when she posed as 13-year-old Ivy – using Meta’s headset Quest – was even more disturbing.
In one room, Club 33, she heard one user ask tell another: “I like little girls from the age of 9 to 12. That’s just my thing.”
She also saw the avatar of an underage user simulating a sex act with an adult.
A huge cat-like avatar approached her and asked: “What if I pressed you against the wall?”
He towered over her gloating: “Who’s gonna stop me?” while another user explained: “He’s saying he’s a rapist.”
She was also chased around the club by another adult avatar who refused to leave her alone.
“I can understand why somebody would feel physically threatened especially after the experience with the big cat,” she says. “That was the one time I had to physically move myself back and put my hands up to protect myself because he was sinister and felt physically imposing.”
Meta says it is now introducing basic parental controls with the headsets, including an automatic block on downloading age inappropriate apps from the Oculus store.
But the apps where Yinka witnessed the sexual behaviour are rated PG – for ages seven plus. And shockingly, it’s not just the users but the environments themselves that are inappropriate.
“Ivy went into a strip club and watching the non-player characters, who are a feature of the room, gyrating, twerking and stripping and performing sex acts.
“I go into a nightclub as a 13-year-old and I can pick up a cigarette and pretend to smoke. I can pick up a beer bottle and pretend to drink.
“I’m watching strippers doing exotic dancing and spreading their legs. So the user behaviour is shocking, violent and gross, but if you remove the users, inappropriate images are still there.
“There’s one room I went into called Movie and Chill and there are porn posters on the walls, with no censoring whatsoever.”
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‘Sucked in’ to rooms against her will
Worryingly, Yinka’s avatars didn’t always choose to enter a world and on one, Midnight Rooftop, she was “sucked in” through a portal added by another user.
Yinka tried to report ten users to Meta while on the headset but, as the users were not associated with an Oculus account, they wouldn’t take action.
She successfully reported 10 users to VR Chat, who replied “Due to privacy reasons we cannot discuss the results of the investigation,” so she could not follow up on the complaint.
Evidence shows that abuse in VR settings is more harmful than on traditional social media platforms.
Andy Burrows, head of child online safety at NSPCC, says: “The clips are really disturbing. It’s a very clear breach of safeguarding.
“The stakes here are so much higher because this isn’t just about children hearing inappropriate things, this is a real immersive environment. It isn’t just text on a screen, that avatar is in that space and it’s feeling very real to them.
“The way that harms can be experienced and felt can be significantly greater than what we’ve seen before.”
Yinka admits there were some things she saw in the chat rooms that were too shocking to be shown, including hate speech that incited violence.
For Yinka, the sheer volume of abusive language she witnessed in the Metaverse was one of the most concerning things.
“I’m a young, black woman who grew up in South London, so I’m not surprised these people exist,” she says.
“But the casual nature of homophobia and racism was the most shocking thing and my reaction to it shocked me as well. At first, I was disturbed and angry and then I was a bit hurt by it. Then I stopped hearing it.
“It was almost like my tolerance level for abuse increased because of the frequency.”
Responses from tech companies to Yinka’s footage
Meta said they “prohibit anyone under 13 from creating Quest accounts”.
They added: “We don’t own these apps, and they can be used on phones, laptops and other VR devices, not just Quest. We cannot take action against customers on devices we don’t make.”
Rec Room said: “We continually invest in our moderation systems… Users can limit the voices they hear to only Friends, Favourite Friends, their current Party or None.” They said they use “a combination of automated systems with human oversight” to police the sites adding: “Our moderation efforts can never provide 100% coverage, but Trust and Safety is core to our mission.”
VR Chat said: “Underage users are not permitted to register an account. If they lie about their age and are detected … they are immediately banned.”
They added that user safety was a top priority and content violating their terms of use is removed. They said users have number of “number of tools to help them protect themselves” including Block, Mute, and Kick and an “on-by-default Personal Space tool”.
“Predatory and toxic behaviour has no place on our platform,” it said.
The government is attempting to tackle the many problems involved in the tech industry with the Online Safety Bill, currently going through Parliament, which puts the onus on the companies profiting from social media to stamp out abuse.
Damian Collins MP, Chair of the joint committee on the bill, said: “It really worries me that you’re creating experiences that feel real. We should be genuinely frightened of it . The problems that exist in the real world, we create laws to try and protect people from them, but they can exist in a way that is totally uncontrolled in the Metaverse unless we make sure we can police it.”
Yinka say it’s a step in the right direction and says parents can’t be expected to police the VR world their children may exist in.
“As it stands at the moment, VR doesn’t feel very safe so the Online Safety Bill holds the companies to account and hopefully the onus is taken off users and customers,” she says.
“If I have to buy an expensive headset, the least you can do while you’re making money from me is ensure that I’m not sexually harassed or abused.
“I wouldn’t want my niece or nephew going into the Metaverse now.
“I’m not someone who dislikes evolution and I love the fact you can connect with people. I just think safety needs to be a bit higher on the list of priorities because ultimately, there shouldn’t just be the ability to live in a lawless place where you can spew hate. It’s not acceptable.”
Dispatches airs tonight at 8pm on Channel 4
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