The Washington Post reports on documents given to the United States Congress in an extensive article pointing to Meta's leaders avoiding the subject of its role in children encountering adult strangers in Horizon Worlds."After leaked Meta studies led to congressional hearings in 2021, the company deployed its legal team to screen, edit and sometimes veto internal research about youth safety in VR, according to a joint statement the current and former employees submitted to Congress in May," the article reports.In 2022, an employee wrote "an analysis of app reviews indicated many were being driven off the app because of child users.""A company official wrote in response that if employees planned to share the findings more widely across the company, they should “avoid saying ‘kids’ like we know for sure they are kids — instead use ‘alleged Youth’ or ‘alleged minors with young sounding voices who may be underage."Head over to The Washington Post to read the entire article, but here's one more snippet:..the team studied publicly available app reviews and VR Facebook groups, where they found hundreds of allegations of inappropriate behavior on Meta products, including grooming — building a rapport with a child to enable abuse — along with bullying and simulated sexual acts. She said they compiled those allegations in a 59-page document that they shared with a small group of colleagues in an effort to spread awareness. Meta did not respond to questions on that document, which was among those submitted to Congress.Notably, much of what's discussed in the piece takes place before Meta formally invited those under 13 to play in VR by introducing "preteen accounts" that let parents, among other things, control which apps and worlds they can access. By default, these preteen accounts don't have access to Horizon Worlds at all.With Meta Connect right around the corner, I'm extremely curious to see how Mark Zuckerberg and his team respond. For some context, here's a portion of an interview between me and Meta's then-head of VR and AR Mark Rabkin at Meta Connect in 2023:Hamilton: What changed to make a change the minimum age from 13 to ten?Rabkin: A lot of work to be done to make it so. I think there is a lot of young folks who are super excited about MR and VR, super excited about the content, we saw a lot of the content that is popular with kind of a teen age groups, whether Horizon or VRChat or Rec Room or Roblox..."Hamilton: Is VR safe for 10-year olds? Rabkin: "I think so. We did tremendous amount of work over the last few years to make it possible. We worked on safety and integrity. We worked on a ton of research at the physical level of folks wearing it. We worked on Guardian. We worked on all these things, but most importantly, recently what held us back is we wanted to have better family accounts, better parental controls, better parental management and approval for what content the young folks get and then monitoring by the parents of how time was spent and so on. Once we got it to the point that we thought it was good enough to release, I'm very excited to have made that move and then we're continuing our investment on the parental controls and management stuff, which I think is probably the most important piece to make it industry-leading. And then families can choose what each teen and what each pre-teen is ready for, which I think very dramatically by that young person and the family."Meta Reducing Quest 2 & 3 Minimum Age To 10 Years OldBREAKING: Meta will reduce the minimum age for Quest 2 from 13 to 10 later this year, and this will also apply to Quest 3. Preteen accounts will need to be set up and managed by a parent.UploadVRDavid HeaneyMeta Now Lets Parents Let Preteens Access Horizon WorldsMeta is rolling out per-person and per-place parental requests for preteens as young as 10 to access Horizon Worlds.UploadVRIan HamiltonIf you're looking for more reading after looking through the Washington Post's article, I encourage you to read Henry Stockdale's landmark piece from earlier this year on UploadVR.com where he charted the effect of Meta's changing priorities on developers as the company changed focus from Quest to Horizon.