In February 2024, an article was published on the social journalism website Medium¹, making various allegations against Linden Lab and some of its employees and contractors together with various users on the Second Life platform, as well as claims relating to some of the services provided to users of the platform.
At the time of the article’s publication, I contacted the Lab concern its claims and allegations, but other than referencing a broad statement being given to those contacting Support on the matter, and an off-the-record comment, there was no official response for the purposes of quoting. As such, I decided not to comment on the claims or the Lab’s response until such time there was any formal statement on the matter, rather than writing on the basis of pure speculation.
Such a statement was made on Wednesday, March 20th, 2024 (when I happened to be away from Second Life entirely, dealing with an exceptionally hectic personal life, hence the somewhat belated nature of this piece). It came from company owner and Executive chairman, Brad Oberwager, who is, as many know, extremely hands-on with Linden Lab and its products.
If you have not already done so, you can read the full statement from Mr. Oberwager here.
For my part, I’ll simply highlight the core part of the statement, coming as it does after numerous in-world and on-line demands that the Lab publicly respond to the piece published via Medium’s website:
I promise you that we are taking this very seriously. Very. Full stop.
I promise we hear you. We know you’re angry and you’re confused. We are working to do our best to resolve your concerns and restore your trust in us. These are complicated issues and we want to do things right. We will make mistakes along the way. I wish I could say we will not, but we will.
As owner of Linden Lab, I have 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.
One of our top priorities has been to ensure the safety of our residents, moles, employees, and families. There are real people behind the avatars, and it has been important to confirm that nobody was in actual physical danger.
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.
While there were almost immediate calls on on social media and in-world for the Lab to make known its response to the allegations made and provide “full transparency” (or even a basic “we are investigating”), they were perhaps premature.
Given the seriousness of some of the allegations made (including the potential for them to be defamatory towards the company and the individuals named), caution of approach in even the most preliminary investigation was bound to be required, together with legal circumspection on what the Lab might or could say. This is further compounded by the fact the Medium piece brings together numerous different claims and allegations, some of which are perhaps easier to verify (e.g. issues within the Marketplace), others of which are not (including obtaining some veracity concerning the author of the piece, particularly given its pseudonymous nature²). Ergo, any investigation, either preliminary or in-depth, would / will take weeks (even months) to complete.
Nor, frankly, should there be any expectation that – given a statement has now been made – that the results of any investigation will be publicly disclosed in full once completed. There may well be legal or other ramifications which preclude this from happening.
That said, I do welcome the statement by Mr. Oberwager; it actually speaks well of the company that as soon as they have been in a position to respond to user sentiment on the matter, they have done so, and through the voice of their owner .
Footnotes
- At the time of writing this piece, the article in question has been found in violation of Medium’s rules of publication, and is subject to further investigation, and thus suspended from being viewed.
- The Medium piece was published under the account name “dantesedmond1844”.This appears to be a intentional reference to Edmond Dantès, the protagonist in Alexander Dumas’ 1844 novel of revenge / vengeance, The Count of Monte Cristo. Which, given the overall nature of the article, to me would appear to be a very curiously coincidental choice of account name (or possibly a contextual choice).
Note: as this piece is related to an on-going investigation onto an article containing unproven (and potentially questionable) allegations against specific individuals, it is requested than any comments offered in response to this piece forgo naming or otherwise discussing those individuals.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
First, I have no knowledge what these conplaints are. Second, Medium is not a source in which I have 100% confidence. Third, pseudonymous allegations are problematic at best; they may be the only way for a whistleblower to safely bring to light a serious problem, or they may be the quickest way for a troublemaker to stir the pot.
Since such statements are virtually impossible to fully substantiate or to defend against, it sounds like the Lab are following the only course open to them. I hope that this is something they can resolve quickly and with minimal waste of resources. For myself, I have no problem with the Lab, and I look forward to continuing in SL for many years to come.
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Well said!
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If you use internet archive – Wayback machine you could still read it 😉
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Yeah – I use Wayback a lot myself. But in this context, it’s the fact that after initially putting the article behind a warning that it was under investigation, Medium have (at some point in the last couple of weeks or so), concluded that initial investigation and now removed direct access to it (410 page error + a statement it is under investigation for violation of their publication rules).
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I read the Medium piece before it was taken down. While it seemed serious, an accusation is not a conviction. However, these days, the court of public opinion can prevail over the actual trial with the final verdict being buried months later on page 10, column 3, well after the lynching in the town square.
I’m not going to speculate, rather I’ll let the authorities do their work and will abide by their assessment of the issue.
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Indeed. Hence my opting not to comment at the time 🙂 .
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It’s fine as far as it goes, but two things stand out: “some” of the allegations are unfounded. Totally believable, but it leaves hanging the question of whether or which allegations *are* founded. And as for reviewing policies, I think they have a problem with enforcement of current policies. New policies won’t mean much if they can’t get a handle on monitoring and enforcing.
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Quite possibly, even probably, none. This is the only accurate statement that can be made while the investigation is ongoing. Personally, under the circumstances, I’m leaning towards “none.” SL is probably fine, and this was just a drive-by attempt at reputational damage.
What is far more interesting to me is “Who posted it?” Who were they working for? Who gains if Second Life can be tarnished in the court of public opinion?
As a former journalist, I give unsourced stories the same weight that I would give any other work of fiction: hopefully entertaining, possibly thought provoking, probably a complete fabrication. That’s why I appreciate Inara’s reporting here. She’s given verifiably factual information and not engaged in relaying unverified statement.
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It’s possible that in some cases, it’s much easier to figure out if some of the allegations are unfounded or not. In others… it might be harder to figure out what’s the full story behind them, and thus the incomplete/ambiguous stance.
That said, and for the sake of those involved, I surely hope that they can clear this stain on their honour, and I concur with Inara when she says that at least LL, at the highest levels, is doing what is required from a company in their position to do:
The rest, aye, you’re right, actually acting as “vigilantes” and pro-actively monitoring such violations of their ToS and terminate these activities as quickly as humanely possible… that’s hardly a job that can be taken by a handful of well-intended, but clearly overwhelmed employees.
The SL Grid is still a city of over a half million inhabitants. That’s a big city, and you don’t have enough police offers for all of that.
As a comparison…
My home city (Lisbon, Portugal) has about 700,000 residents (but a couple million come to work there every day). On average, for that population, we have 9-10 investigation detectives per 100,000 inhabitants, and a police force of about 180-200 officers per 100,000 inhabitants. Aye, I know, it’s not much, but we’re a comparatively low-crime country overall, with violent crime (beyond domestic violence, that is, which is about the same as everywhere in the Western world, unfortunately) next-to-zero since drug consumption (and prostitution) has been decriminalised, and police focuses on catching drug dealers and pimps instead of pestering the people in general.
That said, we’d expect that LL had, say, a staff of perhaps 50 ‘detectives’ to figure out what’s going on inside the virtual world, and a much larger staff of perhaps 1,000+ ‘police officers’ — basically, in-world Lindens just looking around to make sure everything is ok and everybody is behaving.
One might argue that, in SL, residents who are in-world are more likely to get together in specific areas, so the work of the ‘Linden Police’ would be far easier (they would just need to be in the ‘popular’ places). But on the other hand there is a vast area to cover where potential illegal activity is under way (think skyboxes with forbidden content — which will be visited by very small crowds and on unpredictable schedules); thus, not all ‘Linden Police officers’ would be covering events and popular areas, they would also need to spend time just wandering around.
‘Detectives’ would often work under cover, or in plain clothes, so to speak; using perfectly regular avatars to ‘mingle in’, joining the suspicious groups, trying to get in touch with those who own these skyboxes and get invited to them.
Sounds pretty reasonable, right? However, I’m pretty sure that LL has none of that, and if they have a tenth of that staff just for ‘detective’ and ‘officer’ roles, I would be very surprised. More likely those who actually do some ‘policing’ aren’t on that role full time, anyway, and have to spread themselves thin across all their tasks. There might be little left over for pro-active ‘policing’.
Not to mention the reaction of the public-at-large if they heard that such a huge ‘police force’ would be deployed to ‘watch over the SL Grid’. Residents would just freak out — at least most of them would! — although I can imagine that a few would actually welcome such a drastic change. I remember the olden days when you would see the odd Linden here or there, often just helping out a resident, sometimes spontaneously attending a user-organised event (just for the sake of, well, ‘being there’, being visible, not detached from the virtual world). While this is still the case every now and then, it’s very rare (the ‘Linden density’ in SL has dwindled to essentially zero, when taking into account the huge size of the whole grid!).
No, essentially, LL is mostly reactive, and relies on abuse reports — which obviously need some work to be weeded out and selected for investigation — to get their jobs done. They simply haven’t enough people to do anything than that, and, as so many have reported, the level of reaction is very variable, and depends on a lot of circumstances that we residents are not aware of.
But, of course, I’m not ‘excusing’ LL, in the same way that many try to ‘excuse’, say, Facebook or Twitter (never mind the difference in size!), also claiming that these huge social media barons cannot hire enough people to do a pro-active screening of their content (especially outside the English-speaking environment). Second Life, after all, tries to present itself as a ‘safe’ alternative to conventional, 2D social media, mostly through a much stricter ToS on the important things (e.g., what is considered criminal activity in most jurisdictions in RL) and much milder on the unimportant things (such as so-called adult content, graphical violence, or the use of profanity etc. which is heavily censored in so many other environments — LL just asks residents to pay attention to the region/parcel settings, that’s all).
They have the correct attitude, I think, but I fully understand that it’s very hard to enforce the LL ToS across the whole grid.
What is possible, and effective to a very small degree, is having communities that self-police themselves, warn visitors well in advance that such self-policing is active, and dutifully report to LL. It’s a volunteer watchforce, without any global reach, and not organised, centrally-planned, or even official in any way. They only have ‘power’ over the communities they oversee — and which everybody may be able to visit, or boycott them if they disagree with the way they’re ‘policing’. The net result is a certain degree of ‘safety’ in a very few areas in SL, but of course you cannot expect that the whole grid is set up in the same way.
Even if LL tried to encourage such ‘neighbourhood watches’, by, say, requiring that every resident is integrated into a community, they would get angry mobs rioting on the streets against the lack of freedom for those who just want to be left alone, or who simply don’t identify with any ‘organised community’ whatsoever. It’s no surprise that LL is now actively encouraging the existing communities — because they help LL out in ‘weeding out the rotten players’ — but they’ve been very careful in not implying that these are the ‘future’ of SL. The vast majority of those 600,000 regular, monthly active residents do not want to ‘live in a community’ where they’re being ‘policed’ by other residents. They would also not agree to being policed by LL, though, and that might also be one reason why LL can internally excuse itself for not having more ‘pro-active in-world policing’ — they might fear the backlash.
And looking just at the most vocal SL residents in the past two decades, I can only agree that this is indeed the case.
So… there is no real choice here, or, rather, whatever solution there might exist, it’s beyond my ability to come up with one reasonable suggestion.
Perhaps that’s also the case of LL in general; they’re stuck without a good solution, and so just rely on their existing internal policies on how to ‘enforce’ the ToS…
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What we need is more investigative journalism! 🙂
There is not much that we can do except to speculate about the motivation behind the pseudonymous author of that now-censored Medium article.
He (I’m using a pronoun consistent with how he publicly writes his profile) seems to, at least, have some working knowledge of some of the internals of LL; that was obvious in the way he described many details.
Then again, were such ‘internals’ such a closely-guarded secret…? I mean, it’s conceivable that, if you have enough knowledge of corporate organisation(s), you’d easily figure out a reasonably-convincing story, especially if you have many years of experience in being a SL resident who is quietly absorbing as much information as possible from several sources in order to concoct a reasonably-believable story.
Notwithstanding all of the above… sure, I accept the (highly likely) “disgruntled employee” story, merely because it’s the most plausible of all possible scenarios, if we assume there are some things in the story that are true, or at least loosely based on factual events, even if — let’s put it mildly — wildly exaggerated.
It’s also in a sense worrying that Patch Linden is singled out as the ‘ringleader’ on what is essentially a child porn ring mixed in with some furry sexuality for good measure.
Clearly, it’s personal. And there must be a reason for that: what was the motive for this semi-journalistic pseudo-whistleblowing article?
And it will be the pursuit of that motive that may lead to some conclusion.
This guy is after Patch Linden, all right. But why? What for? We’re probably not talking about an unhappy Mole who was fired (although that is mentioned often in the article) with what they perceived not to be a valid reason. I think that the story is way too elaborate for that.
There might be someone inside the ‘Lab who is unhappy about the way Patch Linden handles things, so they sort of come up with some fake allegations, but, to divert suspicion, they get an ‘outsider’ to write the story, and let them visit certain places, take a few pictures, figure out for themselves how deep this story goes, and gently persuades him to write the story.
In this case, we would assume that the author of the article is a journalist and tried to attract the attention of the real media (e.g. Washington Post, NY Times…). But when that failed, he surely would go to slightly less high-profile media, to see if anyone was interested in picking up the story. Once it became clear that nobody would do that — either because they didn’t take it too seriously, or they had too little factual data to confirm all the allegations (beyond what can easily be forged!), or there was no other independent source to correlate these findings with. Or, well… they thought that whatever happens at LL, these days, is not worth of attention — Second Life being out of the limelight anyway — and so no serious publication was interested in pursue the story further.
So… he published it himself under a pseudonym, as the “last chance” of getting his message out to the public-at-large and at least obtain the guarantee that LL would do some internal fact-checking and ask the correct questions from certain people very high up the hierarchy, and expect to be happy about the answers — or else.
AFAIK, at the date I’m typing this comment, there have been no announcements that Patch was either fired, or suspended, or even being under investigation. One has to assume, therefore, that Patch is not the object of any internal investigation, except as a potential source for further information. But he’s still firmly at his post in spite of the serious allegations against him and the threat of a much deeper and vaster investigation, this time using an external team specially hired by LL for the purpose of conducting a “deeper investigation” on the subject.
Will we ever hear anything from the results of this “investigation”?
My guess is “no”. That will require a much deeper investigation, and one done properly by the authorities. And I’m pretty sure that this will not happen, except perhaps as part of a libel/defamation lawsuit, and we won’t hear much about that, either.
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“Clearly, it’s personal.”
Indeed. Hence my referencing the account name (not the cited author name) under which the article was published. Picking the name of Edmond Dantès and the year of publication of The Count of Monte Cristo is a little too specific a reference, leaning perceptions towards the Medium piece being an airing of a personal vendetta more than anything else.
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You know, Inara, I thought precisely the same thing when first reading the article — “who is this guy anyway?” And I laughed at the rather clear and obvious references.
Again, Prokofy Neva will be proven right — this is just one act in the big drama of the Furry Wars, where one disgruntled party went a long, long way to enact their revenge.
Two things might happen here. Either the author is quite knowledgeable about the technology, and, in that case, he has covered his tracks without leaving a trace. Medium will have no clue to his real identity, and neither will LL. LL might suspect who it is (based on what he knows, how he describes events, etc.), but to effectively sue for libel/defamation, they’ll need to go much deeper than that.
Of course, they can go all the way through with criminal charges and let the FBI go through all the data, but it won’t be easy to pin a real name to the article.
The other possibility, of course, is that this guy is simply too furious and too careless, believing that it’s that easy to hide their identity behind a pseudonym, and committing several typical mistakes — in that scenario, Medium will very quickly figure out who he is and collaborate with LL to help identify him.
Also, interestingly, Prokofy noticed a few oddities in the way he writes things which — according to Prokofy, that is — may point out that this person is European. Now these days, thanks to anti-plagiarism AIs, it’s relatively easy to figure out, based on someone’s style, who wrote the article — which, being quite long, surely has lots of opportunities for having been “fingerprinted” for specific ways of writing things, subtle grammar mistakes, and so forth.
I personally think that the author is under the first category, and not the second, i.e. we’re talking about someone who knows very well how to hide his identity online — or, more possibly, who has a friend able to do it on his behalf.
And why do I think that?
Consider the following: this guy’s name, his account name, and his picture, are “unique” in the Google sense of the word — there is, in the whole of the Internet, just one reference to this guy, and it’s precisely this article on Medium.
Now, these days, such a coincidence — the ability of going unnoticed for decades and “suddenly” popping up with a name, an account, and a picture (especially a picture!) that has never been indexed by the crawling engines before… well, how rare is that? It’s true that both Google and Bing tend to limit searches for specific persons these days, in the interest of protecting their privacy, but, still, it’s almost uncanny that such a person has left no obvious trails on the all-powerful search engines. They also don’t have any social media account, nor have they used the name, or the account, or the picture, anywhere else on the planet.
It’s 2024! How extraordinary would that be!
I seriously suspect that even running the best anti-plagiarism AIs across this text will reveal essentially nothing. Not even a human expert — giving them some clues, as I presume that LL might have, regarding his possible identity — will be able to find a match.
Actually, today, it’s incredibly easy to do all the above.
First, of course, generate a lot of random names, and search for all of them on the search engines, using Tor as a connection (or, at least, a good VPN, preferably one located in a country with little to no privacy laws). Get the one with the least possible entries.
Then — still using Tor/VPN — go to one of the free AI generation engines, and start generating human faces. Probably the “best” are not even the ever-popular DALL-E and/or Midjourney. Next, of course, use several tools to “enhance” the image in various ways: the point here is not necessarily to “look great”, but rather to make the resulting image impossible to reconstruct from the source.
The next step is the easiest one, create an account on Medium. Use a discardable email address for registration — preferably on yandex.com, which will be impossible for the US/EU authorities to request any data from (it will also be cancelled shortly afterwards anyway). That takes just a few seconds, and using Tor is almost mandatory in such cases (lest you get the Russians overly interested in you!).
Create your account on Medium, upload the picture — you’re all set up.
Now, to the text itself.
There might be better ways of writing “untrackable” text, of course, but there are a few simple and accessible ones. For instance, you can start writing your text in very formal English, grammatically correct in every sentence (for example, use Grammarly for that), then use DeepL to translate everything in Russian. Grab that text, feed it to Google Translate, and get it back in English. The result will not be the same text, but will have almost the same meaning. This step can, of course, be repeated several times, and then complemented with a bit of ChatGPT magic to “change the tone of the text so that it sounds as if a journalist has written it”. For extra paranoia, split the text in different sections (they’re so big anyway), feed each block to a different translator, translate it to different languages — they just need to be very different from English; translating to any East Asian language (i.e., CJK) and back again will also produce very good results. Do minor revisions here and there where appropriate; use ChatGPT in different languages as well (it doesn’t do such a good job as in English, but close enough, and it’ll all be re-assembled back to English anyway).
The result will be something quite readable, in a very different style from the original text, but with the same exact meaning.
And untraceable.
If that’s the case, well…
Forget it, you’ll never ever get proof about this guy’s real identity. As said, LL might suspect, among all their former disgruntled employees, who it might have been, but there will be no way to bring enough evidence in court, even if they manage to subpoena all possible AI and translator engines and get at all their records.
But there are even more creative things that can be done to make everything even less transparent and utterly impossible to figure out. I think, however, that the above steps would be more than enough. After all, the burden of proof will remain on those who accuse, and without any proof, even the most evil, disgruntled, revenge-seeking ex-employee, with all the motives in the world to write the article, will be impossible to hold accountable. And that, in turn, means that LL will not be able to clean up the stains of libel and defamation, much less Patch. They will remain so long as someone, somewhere, might have stored a copy of the article — which might, one day, get removed from archive.org as well, it’s just a question of getting a court to issue an order to do so — but in the meantime I’m pretty sure there are enough copies in circulation.
Of course, this will only work if the author does not brag about it… which is one of the easiest ways to catch cybercriminals. They will brag, sooner or later, unless they’re pros.
My bet, therefore, is that either “Edmond Dantès” is (or has access to) a brilliant master of digital disguise, and therefore will never be found, and whatever lawsuits or criminal charges LL tries to come up with will be doomed to fail without any proof that can be presented in court; or, well, this guy is not a “professional” and will have made several mistakes which will be easy to catch (by professional cyberteams, of course), and they’ll be answering in court for this article, sooner or later; at the very least, it will be expected from him to publish a retraction and a formal apology, I guess.
It is an interesting case, though 🙂
Also… if the result is a thorough internal investigation by LL, and having stricter rules about what is permissible and what is not, well… perhaps it was worth all the trouble in publishing this article, after all.
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Like most subjects, my hunch is there are layers that point to particular people, who where most likely responsible for such an article to ever be created. I have never believed nor understood that any ex-employee of LL could ever do such a thing. Because regardless of internal issues, professional conduct is always paramount in negative company climate negatives. Especially when ones resume would be tarnished or hampered, if found out that they were responsible for theroretical accusations that lead to defamation.
Reading Gwyneth Llewelyn replies, she has some points to make that could define a review of that original article post. One of the most eye-opening was the publishers assumed gender. Let’s be very clear here, the post was nothing to do with concern on its sub-angle, it was used as a secondary weapon (and there are several key clues in that article that could transcribe this). The true reason was personal beef towards all of the formentioned targets.
I agree that there must be a full investigation, in order to fully drag out the person who was responsible. This is because the obvious system of far deeper if not darker intentions, therefore background of individual who wrote the article. That also had far reaching histories not only of SL, but a negative attitute towards the people mentioned in it.
The other is if this person is not found and a full review of the person who was responsible is not investigated, than the issues pertaining to the free account system (which is already abused by social media trolls and general residents to cause harassment inworld), is also a residual danger to other residents.. Which it has been with the changes of attitude of abusing social media by its user base over the last decade. TOS must also reflect these issues as an emcompassing whole.
The person must be found and must be legally held accountable.
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I’m delighted that the most serious allegations were apparently investigated so swiftly, although there’s an interesting use of the word ‘some’ in that statement which potentially raises a question or two. There were other allegations, however, regarding the culture and practices within certain parts of the Lab that I expect to be swept away and ignored just as thoroughly, and which certainly seem to have been so far.
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As an SL “lifer” who logs-in once in a while I was surprised to read about the Medium article and its accusations. I found Prokofy’s Second Thought (*) blog and was able to learn some background. So, I can see the Lab has some heavy lifting to do here. There is a delicate balance of protecting the corporate equities and trying to keep this from turning into grist for opportunistic journalists and politicians (is there another kind?). Various persona will have their actions (real or alleged) scrutinized and given the subject matter underlying the accusations it could be bruising. Establishing the actual facts isn’t all that easy and in a virtual world it would be even more difficult. Guilt or innocence is often in degrees and a corporation answering to various stakeholders might see fit to have a quite parting of ways with non-disclosure agreements and even a severance package. The public has a taste for grand denunciation but this might only serve those who don’t want SL to succeed. Then there is the problem of redoing the SL standards of behavior, content and age-play. I was very interested to see “We will make mistakes along the way. I wish I could say we will not, but we will.” It acknowledges the complexities and takes a humble but firm stance. I am not sure but I would not be surprised if the Lab retained an outside law firm or investigator to find out what happened.
Looking for things to read on this I did see a video by a merchant whose product may have been prejudiced by some managers. I hope her case is reviewed and is not “swept away” as some believe it will be.
(*) Thanks Prokofy. Ignore the hecklers.
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