--- title: "UAE Official Says Murder Should Be Illegal in the Metaverse" description: "A United Arab Emirates’ official warned that committing serious crimes including \"murder\" should be made illegal in the metaverse." date: "2022-05-26" modified: "2022-05-26" authors: - name: "Victor Tangermann" job_title: "Senior Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/victor" url: "https://futurism.com/uae-official-murder-illegal-metaverse" categories: - "Future Society" - "Metaverse" - "Virtual Reality" tags: - "legal" - "metaverse" - "united nations" - "virtual reality" --- # UAE Official Says Murder Should Be Illegal in the Metaverse ![A United Arab Emirates’ official warned that committing serious crimes including "murder" should be made illegal in the metaverse.]() *\Image: Maurizio Pesce\* During a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates’ minister of state for artificial intelligence Omar Sultan Al Olama warned that committing serious crimes including "murder" should be made illegal in the metaverse. "If I send you a text on WhatsApp, it’s text right?" Al Olama said, as [quoted by *CNBC*](). "It might terrorize you but to a certain degree it will not create the memories that you will have PTSD from it." "But if I come into the metaverse and it’s a realistic world that we’re talking about in the future and I actually murder you, and you see it," he added. "It actually takes you to a certain extreme where you need to enforce aggressively across the world because everyone agrees that certain things are unacceptable." While it arguably makes sense to outlaw particularly heinous content, such as child sexual abuse imagery, in the virtual world things become a little more hazy when it comes to virtual "murder," an argument that certainly stretches the definition of the word. It's one thing to shoot an enemy in a first-person shooter, but an entirely different thing to harass somebody or distribute illegal content. In other words, it's hard to delineate what constitutes crime inside a virtual world — especially one that [doesn't really exist yet]() — which is a question [scholars have been struggling with for years](). Then there's the question of who gets to make the decisions over what should the deemed verboten in the metaverse. Al Olama turned to the UN's agency for information and communication technologies, the International Telecommunication Union, to come up with international safety standards. Sure, having an independent international body in charge may make some sense. As the social media landscape has already shown, having online spaces govern themselves [leaves substantial gaps in their moderating efforts]() and allows for plenty of harassment and the villainizing of entire communities. But do we really want the UN deciding what games are allowed in VR? Is Al Olama suggesting we should have a virtual police force capable of "aggressively" enforcing rules? It's a sticky problem considering any large-scale metaverse would transcend the boundaries of countless jurisdictions, making such operations legally and logistically fraught. Despite the optimism of tech leaders and [billions of dollars spent](), the metaverse, as Al Olama describes it at least, is still a long way from becoming a reality. We don't even know if a worldwide, unified metaverse will ever take hold, especially given the substantial interest [from several competing players]() already. And, of course, this assuming that the idea of strapping on an uncomfortable VR headset so [kids can scream at you]() ever catches on in any serious way. **READ MORE:** [Serious crime in the metaverse should be outlawed by the U.N., UAE minister says]() \[*CNBC*\] **More on the metaverse:** *[In Extremely Confusing Twist, Facebook Says It Isn't Building a Metaverse After All]()* ## Author I've been at Futurism since 2017, where my role has evolved to encompass design, writing, and increasingly editing. I've always been fascinated by space exploration and advanced transportation, which I've leaned into by interviewing luminaries in those fields while closely following the dimensions of policy and regulation that allow next-generation projects to succeed -- or, sometimes, to fail. I'm also keenly interested in the effects of generative AI on society, policies, and democratic institutions, as well as clean energy, physics and biology, and the vagaries of tech leadership. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, PC Magazine, Jalopnik, Fox News, and the New York Post. I spent my childhood living in locations including Manila, the Philippines, and Geneva, Switzerland, attended McGill University, and now live in Toronto, Canada. Before Futurism I worked at AskMen and a small photography studio. In my free time, I'm an avid gardener, foodie, and craft beer lover, as well as a maker of artisanal hot pepper sauces. I have a magnificent dog named Freida. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()