What does it take to moderate ai overview in search? Interesting article includes insights from AI raters at Google. www.techpolicy.press/what-does-it...

Content moderation backsliding watch. Headline is about Covid misinfo but also includes election misinfo (Jan 6 etc.)

I’ve been extremely skeptical of prebunking but this is fascinating and slightly heartening even?

Really cool resource from the Thriving in Games group about how game developers of online games can support players in crisis: digitalthrivingplaybook.org/method/helpi...

Not sure how I feel about the framing of "model welfare" but I do find this idea of Claude telling a user "I already told you I won't do that and you didn't stop, so I'm cutting you off" kind of interesting. Some might immediately jump to the "I can't do that Dave" HAL comparison, but ....

Glad to see more folks working on and building evidence of this. But also want to figure out what will actually make Valve specifically move on this: www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

NEW: Earlier today, Mastercard denied playing a roll in the Steam and itch.io purging NSFW games. But Valve now says Mastercard communicated concerns indirectly through payment processors and banks. kotaku.com/mastercard-d...

Content moderation backsliding watch: LinkedIn removes deadnaming examples from hate speech policy- www.engadget.com/social-media...

Behold the nope- CEO of Roblox wants it to also be a dating platform. www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

Per @stephentotilo.bsky.social looks like PUBG now wants to be Roblox and/or Fortnite. but are they up to the content moderation challenges for what that means? www.gamefile.news/p/krafton-pu...

Trust and safety workers had a LOT to say after the column I wrote last week asking why more don't speak out publicly. Here's what they say I missed: www.platformer.news/trust-and-sa...

Interesting to see DuckDuckGo go the polar opposite way of all search and give folks an ability to opt out of AI results.

Read this interview with a personal hero, Professor @daniellecitron.bsky.social: "we have essentially presumed that data collection is a good...We have long ignored this important inclination that collection itself is endangering our privacy and civil liberties" www.politico.com/newsletters/...

The focus of Steam’s policy change has been on adult content since that’s what they took action on, but if stuff that’s against payment processors policies is truly against theirs, they should act against hateful/extremist games; Alex Jones NWO wars would be a great one. www.ign.com/articles/val...

Hey! Looks like a bunch of video game companies posted their DSA mandated transparency reports- the first transparency reports for many game companies. Let’s take a look!

Our newest research shows antisemitic comments per day on the Facebook accounts of Jewish members of Congress increased nearly fivefold after Meta’s disastrous policy change in January. www.adl.org/resources/ar...

This is nuts. Among other things huge fan of @nicolecarpenter.bsky.social and her work, are they insane. kotaku.com/polygon-sold...

If you had told me 5 years ago that major social media companies would give up on content moderation and video game companies would share real data with researchers who then produced papers about automated toxicity detection in online games I would have laughed. But now: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20968

Movie you’ve watched more than six times using gifs. (“Hard mode” no Star Wars, Star Trek, or LOTR)

Interesting to see the new CEO of Discord come explicitly from gaming (Activision/Blizzard) vs more of a social media world, as I feel like they could have gone either way. Will be interesting to see what that means for safety: discord.com/blog/passing...

Honestly it’s an honor just to be nominated.

New: Gamers are role-playing school shootings inside Roblox. The group, Active Shooter Studios, attracted hundreds of fans to recreations of tragedies at Columbine, Uvalde and more, per ADL. In one I saw, users chanted a white supremacist slogan: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Meta can either a) improve its tools, b) open itself up to middleware providers like Block Party to help users on the receiving end of massive amounts of hate, or c) see its market share dwindle as users flee to sites that don’t kowtow to bad faith clowns or trolls.

God damn it.

Content moderation challenges ahead for Nintendo and the switch 2.

Important study of sexual harassment in voice chat in online games. In particular reinforces the understanding of abuse in these spaces being driven by a very vocal minority of users.

Great piece on the intersection of radicalization and video games, especially this last paragraph that draws an important distinction between moral panic and acknowledging a real issue in the culture and community: www.theguardian.com/games/2025/m...

Definitely Dark Sun shattered lands, starting my life long love of cRPGs. Many memories of waiting for mom to finish work in her office in the apartment and get off the one house computer so we could play.

“Another fascinating snippet she shared was about how Gabe Newell, circa 1998 to the early 2000s, had his eyes set on a social network.” Pfew, social media is not even worse, dodged a bullet: www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

Great to hear designers at #GDC championing wrangling with the complexities of designing social spaces in online games vs kicking the can down the road by removing social features.

Happy to weigh in for this extensive reporting by @alyssamerc.bsky.social in Rolling Stone about terrible harassment of women streamers on Twitch in the context of rising online & offline misogyny more broadly: www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Looking forward to being in SF at #GDC next week. Glad to meet and chat with folks who are interested in talking about fighting hate, harassment and extremism in online multiplayer games. #gdc2025

You know when I think DEI the first thing that comes to mind is definitely 17th and 18th century opera: operawire.com/city-lyric-o...

EA released their first transparency report today. Notable for explicit language prohibiting terrorism and violent extremism but also 0 enforcement actions in that area. Hard to believe it’s 0 across all EA’s games, makes me wonder what they are looking at: media.contentapi.ea.com/content/dam/...

I wrote about the Epstein files influencer 'clusterfuck'

If there’s any doubt we’re in a world without shame: Meta went in front of the U.K. government this week and was like “classic antisemitic tropes of Jewish greed are a gray area for us”- www.yahoo.com/news/whether...

New resource from the GIFCT on threat surfaces in games led by the great @drkowert.bsky.social. Was glad to be part of the working group that had input into this: gifct.org/wp-content/u...

God bless libraries.

let's see how this thing is for questions. Is anyone who can see this currently or previously been part of Community Notes on X/birdwatch on twitter?

Perhaps we *do* need to start anthropomorphising LLMs - not as reliable researchers or trusty assistants, but as familiar spirits or demons. They WILL lie and deceive, and twist your words, and seek to get you into trouble, while following the letter of their instructions.

Pinterest’s user portal that they email you that tells you the status of the content you’ve reported is a thing of beauty.

Really thoughtful safety folks there too…

“The worlds on fire, things are falling apart but at least there aren’t like…bombs being found under children’s…. Goddamnit.”

Glad to have good trust and safety news: “It’s called ROOST from Google, OpenAI, Discord, Roblox and others. It’s a bid to revolutionize trust and safety with open-source tools. The commitments it has received from platforms suggest that it could well succeed. “ www.platformer.news/roost-open-s...

Actually it’s about ethics in gaming journalism

“Meta intentionally employing overtly bigoted anti-LGBTQ dog whistle language, deliberately expressing animus towards one group of people based on their protected characteristics in a hate speech policy — is unprecedented.” techpolicy.press/this-is-not-...

Garbage timeline 19thnews.org/2025/02/offi...

“These platforms have largely abandoned their potential to create community through peer-to-peer networks…They are increasingly used to amplify division and toxicity, rather than build social connections and mutual support.” www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/06/w...

Just awful www.theverge.com/policy/60827...

I’m sure. Took them all day too.