http://www.stepto.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=530
Xbox LIVE policy and Gamertags/Profiles Redux
There’s been a ton of commentary on a Consumerist post about Theresa, an Xbox member who was suspended (not banned) from Xbox LIVE over expression of her sexual orientation in her profile. I don’t know the particulars, because the Consumerist article doesn’t give me much to work with from an investigation standpoint. But since most of the commentary has become rather emotionally charged, I wanted to talk about how things work inside Xbox because I think a lot of people are latching on to some kind of “Microsoft sides with homophobes” meme.
Our current policy for Gamertags and Profiles does not allow expression of sexual orientation under the Terms of Use. That applies to *any* orientation, straight or gay or otherwise. Gamers can however self identify their orientation in voice chat, where context for their statements can be provided.
A few months ago when this first cropped up as something that displeased people, my team saw that although the policy was objective, it’s inelegant. At that time we proactively engaged the LGBT community within Microsoft, as well as external LGBT groups to help inform our policy.
Some people say “hey it’s easy, just stop banning instances of the word ‘Gay’”. We looked at that as a solution, the problem is when reviewing the complaint data historical record, we found that 95+% of the uses of the word “Gay” were pejorative. LGBT phrases and words were far more being used as insults than self identification.
This led me to a bit of an epiphany. Our policy was inelegant because it was being applied to features that weren’t quite prepared for the range of content. And it changed our thinking about a solution. The key here is to have ways for people to express their individuality or community in a way that’s difficult to misuse.
All of this is meant to say we’re not some monolithic corporation trying to establish social mores. We’re not enforcing censorship or bigotry. In fact harassment of gamers of any type be it homophobia or racism or other, is expressly forbidden and my team will take action against it, up to and including a permanent ban.
It’s a tough problem, but for the past few months we’ve been engaged with internal and external community representatives to help solve it. I don’t have anything to announce about it other than we’re working to try and provide the capability for people to more clearly express themselves in ways that are difficult to misuse.
Theresa from the Consumerist article, if you’re reading this, I don’t have your Gamertag or any information about you at all, the article was extremely vague. I’d love to get your feedback and talk to you about how we can make the experience better. Please email me at Stepto@microsoft.com.
