Meta Safety Challenge

This was a TKS case study challenge where our team was given a problem directly from Meta:

"What can Meta do to ensure the safety of young people that use its products? As Meta ventures more into the Metaverse, what ideas are important to consider to provide a high quality, non-harmful experience for younger platform users?"

The challenge forced us to think across two dimensions at once: the existing platforms (Instagram, Facebook) and the emerging Metaverse, where the risks are meaningfully different. In a screen-based environment you can regulate content. In an immersive 3D environment, harmful experiences are spatial and harder to filter.

Our approach centered on three areas: age verification that actually works, behavioral monitoring within immersive environments, and parental oversight tools that don't kill the user experience. We backed each proposal with our research survey, which gathered real perspectives from young users and parents.

The most interesting part of this challenge was realizing that safety and engagement are not opposites. The Metaverse will only succeed if users, especially younger ones, feel safe enough to stay. Meta's business interest and the safety imperative are more aligned than the public debate suggests.

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Outcome: Presented safety recommendations directly to Meta as part of a TKS case study, covering age verification, immersive environment monitoring, and parental oversight tools, backed by original user research.

What I took from it:

• Safety and engagement aren't opposites, especially in the Metaverse. Platforms that feel unsafe lose users. Meta's business interest and the safety imperative point in the same direction.
• Immersive 3D environments create fundamentally different risks than screens. You can filter a piece of content. You can't easily filter a spatial experience: the harm happens in the moment, not after.
• Running a real survey changed the quality of our recommendations. User research consistently surfaces things you'd never find by just thinking about the problem from the outside.