FTC Report on Kids and Virtual Worlds
This morning the Federal Trade Commission released its report on kids and virtual worlds. You can read the report, entitled Virtual Worlds and Kids: Mapping the Risks, here. (I’ve posted similar thoughts over at Terra Nova, apologies for the cross-post).
What initially strikes me about the report is the distance between how the report’s being billed and what it actually says. The billing of the report—and thus the likely media tagline—is that the “FTC Report Finds Sexually and Violently Explicit Content in Online Virtual Worlds Accessed by Minors.” But a more accurate statement would be “FTC Report Finds Surprisingly Little Sexually and Violently Explicit Content in Online Virtual Worlds Accessed by Minors, Especially Compared to What Minors Can Find on the Internet.”
That matches my own perception. There actually isn’t much sex or ultra-violence in Second Life, compared with the Internet as a whole, or the real world.
