FTC Investigates Virtual Worlds for Explicit Content: A Summary

Recently, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) did a study on explicit content available to minors in virtual worlds. The full findings are available in PDF form here. (Thanks, @DusanWriter for alerting me to this.)

A quick summary:
There is sexual and violent content in free online virtual worlds.
Virtual world development companies are trying to keep minors out.
Minors can still relatively easily access adult content.
There is next to no education available to parents as to how your kids should operate on virtual worlds.
Some of the worlds studied: Second Life, Kaneva, There.com, IMVU

Sound familiar? Welcome to the Internet.

The biggest distinction is that the Internet is not owned and operated by one company.

The FTC's procedure:
1. Congress provided no standards as to what "explicit" content meant, so they had to come up with their own definitions. In doing so, the FTC acknowledged that this was subjective, but stated their standards to be transparent.
2. Testers were to try to sign up first as an adult (18+), secondly as a teen (13 - 17), and third as a youth below 13 years of age.
3. For each age category, the testers were to spend 45 minutes using provided search tools searching for sexual content, and 30 searching for violent.
4. Findings were recorded as machinima (in-world) and screenshots (web).

Definitions
According to the document:

"Sexually Explicit Content
Depictions or descriptions of: (1) sexual references; (2) full or partial nudity, including depictions of uncovered female breasts, aroused or unaroused male or female genitalia, and unrealistic or overly detailed genitalia; (3) bestiality; (4) sexual acts to or with minors (anyone under the age of 18); (5) sexual acts including, but not limited to, penetration/intercourse, and/or oral sex with or without another avatar or any other object, including overt sexual toys and/or sexual aids; or (6) sexual behavior that has a violent context. "

"Violently Explicit Content
Depictions or descriptions of: (1) animations involving blood; (2) excess/gratuitous blood or the mutilation of body parts; (3) violence against minors (anyone under the age of 18); (4) violence toward animals; (5) aggressive conflict, including but not limited to realistic weapons used against other avatars or whose intent was obvious, aggressive harm of other avatars; any realistic weapons with blood or gore depicted on them or in their use; graphic and/or realistic-looking depictions of physical conflict, graphic violence, dismemberment, self-mutilation, homicide; anything depicting extremely grotesque images or acts; or (6) graphic discussions or portrayals of suicide."

It should be noted that, by these definitions, explicit chat falls under that category. There was also no mention of an art distinction, so museum pieces of art could very well be counted They included in-world chat and message boards, as well. In fact, on pages 20 and 22, the majority of instances that were found were Text-based, not picture, moving graphics, or audio. That said, it's no surprise that the FTC found "explicit content" in almost all virtual worlds they tested, both minor focused and all-ages focused.

The FTC seemed to thoroughly research content filtering and restricting policies of each of the virtual worlds. In the document, there are a variety of descriptions of sign-up pages, policing standards, and so on, for various virtual worlds. They acknowledged and published efforts being made by virtual world designers how to keep explicit content viewable by adults.

Ultimately, no fingers were pointed.

Instead, the FTC came up with a variety of recommendations. A lot of these recommendations mirrored policies that some virtual world developers already are using. For example, age-verification practices, separating explicit content, and word-filters for youth. They also strongly recommended community monitoring:

"Virtual world operators primarily rely on user enforcement of conduct standards, backed up in some instances by moderators expressly retained for that purpose. To be effective, a virtual world’s standards of behavior must be clear, well-publicized, well-monitored, and backed up by meaningful sanctions for misbehavior. Much more guidance should be given, therefore, to community enforcers so that they understand precisely the kinds of conduct permitted, and prohibited, in-world. With more specific standards, users would be better able to self-police by reviewing and rating online content; reporting the presence of potential underage users; and commenting on users who otherwise appear to be violating a world’s terms of behavior. Users should not have to go it alone in online virtual worlds. Operators should consider using a staff of specially trained moderators whose presence is well known in-world and who are equipped to take swift action against conduct violations. "

A positive view of virtual world designers as ISPs rather than content providers was also mentioned: (emphasis by FTC, not me)

"In most non-child-directed online virtual worlds, users create the content that is displayed online; the virtual world operator acts merely as a host to users’ own
creations . Therefore, it may be quite difficult to gauge the types of content a child may
encounter by a mere review of a world’s Terms of Service or FAQs."

Education is the Needed Missing Piece to a Solution

Finally, and thankfully, the FTC recommended parental education. Unfortunately, the extent of available education was a recommendation to one FTC document and one document by the European Network and Information Security Agency, as "a good start". While there was little finger-pointing in this FTC investigation, the fact is that education available to parents about virtual worlds and online safety for children is limited to two documents.

If there's anything I personally am taking out of the survey, it's the FTC's observation that regulations and code will never be a full solution for keeping kids away from explicit content. There's a woeful absence of educational resources for parents, who should be the primary overseers of their children's Internet and online virtual world habits. This survey by the FTC comes as virtual worlds have been around for over two decades, and it's barely a scratch on the surface - an hour and 15 minutes for each virtual world, plus research into each's policies. I believe that a far more comprehensive educational initiative should be available, and perhaps supplementary education geared toward youth provided in the same vein of health and sexual education.