After a series of scandals, including a case against news site UploadVR, interviews with people in the VR industry reveal frustration about treatment of women
Doree Shafrir / BuzzFeed :
Context & Ripple Effects
Eight months before this reporting, BuzzFeed had already flagged that the VR industry was ill-prepared for abuse and harassment — a warning written before any major scandal broke. What changed by July 2017 is that the abstract risk acquired names and lawsuits: a sexual harassment and wrongful termination case against news site UploadVR became the emblem of a pattern, and people inside the industry went on record about how women are treated.
The UploadVR case ran through the rest of the year — the company later said the harassment and wrongful termination suit against it was over, though sources questioned its initial response — and its aftermath kept unfolding into 2018, when Upload closed its SF office and LA coworking space amid fundraising troubles following the settled suit.
First-order effects
- UploadVR faces legal exposure and reputational damage at the exact moment it is trying to establish itself as a VR media brand, while women across the industry gain a public record of colleagues' frustration to point to.
Second-order effects
- Investors and partners in small VR startups now price founder conduct into funding decisions — the path Upload itself traveled when fundraising troubles compounded the fallout from the settled suit.
Third-order effects
- Harassment outlasts individual scandals: four years on, Meta was still wrestling with harassment inside consumer VR, balancing recording-based safety tools against privacy and headset constraints — evidence that the problem migrated from startup offices into the platforms themselves.
The trend: VR's harassment problem is proving structural rather than episodic, moving from startup HR failures to platform-level design challenges that no single settlement resolves.