On Wednesday 20th March 2024 Brad Oberwager, Linden Lab’s Executive Chairman made a public statement to the Second Life community via the Second Life official blog saying that Linden Lab has been investigating allegations posted to social media recently and that the investigation is still ongoing. There were accusations that some Lindens and Moles were engaged in ageplay (sexualized) and that there were toxic internal company operations going on.
There was a shocking and distressing article on Medium called The Reality of Second Life’s Ageplay Program (posted 25th February I believe) which is archived online via Wayback Machine. There was no statement for weeks that followed the Medium article until everyone saw changes to the About page on the official Linden Lab website where the management section went down for some time.
There has been radio silence from the lab since the end of February until this week when the lab finally decided to make this public statement. The investigation could take weeks or months to be completed in the right way. I hope the results will be published in full to the Second Life community.
The lab are most likely following strict legal advice going forward and there will be major changes to the TOS very soon. I think the lab will get much stricter on acceptable behaviour, ageplay, sexual rules, community standards and more. I think all those that are responsible for this should be punished and banned from Second Life. I think there needs to be significant internal changes now at the lab and new measures to be brought forward to protect people using Second Life.
The lab response to the allegations…
“At the heart of the blog post were unsettling accusations about sexualized, virtual avatar ageplay, including alleged violations of our community guidelines. I want to be clear: we have a zero-tolerance policy against sexualized ageplay. The safety and integrity of the Second Life platform are paramount to us, especially concerning the protection of minors“.
The investigation stage…
There has been anger and a lot of confusion within the Second Life community in recent days and weeks about whats happened. Brad Oberwager the current owner of Linden Lab has now “initiated a thorough investigation, both internally and with external partners, to review whether or not there have been any violations of our company and community policies by employees, contractors, or community members. While early preliminary internal investigations suggest that some of the accusations are unfounded, I want to make sure that we get additional investigative support externally to ensure that the process is fair and thorough“.
Brad is now taking proactive steps going forward mentioning that “Additionally, I am taking proactive steps to review and revamp many of our policies, including a comprehensive review of our Community Standards, Content Guidelines, and Ageplay Policy. Any violation detected will be met with swift enforcement actions to protect our community. We’ll be sharing these revised policies in the coming weeks and, critically, we are turning to the community to help us shape the future of how governance operates within Second Life“.
It’s good that the lab finally officially acknowledged this but there was a long wait for the statement. I’m sure we will hear more from the lab very soon.
Daniel Voyager 