Oasis Consortium Issues New Digital Safety Standards for the Metaverse Era

The Oasis Consortium, an organization of thought leaders across gaming, social media, and dating created to accelerate the development of an ethical Internet, has announced first-of-its-kind operating principles for a new digital age. The Oasis Consortium’s User Safety Standards are the first output of the think tank, which was launched in August to establish and popularize a new digital sustainability model for business in a Web 3.0 world. Thought leaders from companies including dentsu, Kuaishou, Riot Games, and Roblox are founding members of the consortium and worked in concert to create the best practices.

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“The Internet has not been built for safety, it has been built for speed”

“The metaverse, an immersive, interoperable, persistent, fantasized universe, has both incredible promise and danger. It increases our exposure and accelerates the velocity of toxicity. For it to survive and thrive, we must put down safety guardrails from the get-go,” said Tiffany Xingyu Wang, President & Co-founder of the Oasis Consortium. “The metaverse needs the Oasis User Safety Standards. We identified common pitfalls, distilled best practices across industries, and created a safety blueprint for Web 3.0.”

Early industry response demonstrates the enormous opportunity and appetite among organizations for a standard roadmap to follow in maintaining user safety to avoid the ethical pitfalls that have plagued the Web 2.0 era. More than a dozen pioneers have committed to the User Safety Standards and pledge to work toward a safer, more inclusive Metaverse and Web 3.0, including the likes of Agora, Fandom, Grindr, Pandora/Sirius XM, The Meet Group, Wildlife Studios, and Wisdom.

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“Companies are increasingly focused on being a force for growth and also a force for good. However, in order to harness digital wellbeing, we need to improve the ecosystem,” said Angela Johnson, Client Development Officer at dentsu. “That means taking a sustainable and ethical view of media and communications used in the new environments of Web 3.0. Agreeing on common standards will be critical. We are pledging to employ the best practices in our business and to bring them to advertisers around the world, serving as a force multiplier for growth and good in a new era.”

To develop the standards, Oasis Consortium members mined safety practices across online platforms, compared for consistencies and gaps, distilled them into best practices, then applied them across companies to evaluate effectiveness. Similar to the B Corporation Certification, those who pledge to uphold the standards will receive an Oasis User Safety Standards seal.

The User Safety Standards are built around a framework of 5P’s:

1. Priority: establish that Trust & Safety is mission-critical to your company including accountable leadership, resources for development, and cross-functional collaboration
2. People: develop policies based on representation, learning, and wellness including diversity & inclusion, employee wellness, and becoming a learning organization
3. Partnership: gain expertise, objectivity, and prevention of real-world impacts by utilizing industry alliances, an advisory board, and law enforcement to name a few
4. Product: deploy up-to-date technology that enables your success with community guidelines, data for visibility, proactive detection, moderation tools, and user reporting tools
5. Process: define comprehensive processes for an effective operation that should include consistent enforcement, effectiveness audit, bias prevention, and transparency reports among others

“The Internet has not been built for safety, it has been built for speed,” said Julie Inman Grant, Office of the Australian eSafety Commissioner. “To change the culture and ethos of technology development, safety by design mindset is critical to assess and mitigate risk and engineer out misuse. Pairing our interactive self-assessment with the Oasis User Safety Standards has so much promise in helping to build a digitally sustainable future.”

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