Why is Trust and Safety so hard? | This Week in Business

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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

Discord this week rolled out a new approach to tackling toxicity on its platform. This is a problem that has bedeviled online games and communities pretty much since there were online games and communities, so let's see how Discord plans to solve the problem.

QUOTE | "We really want to give people who have had a bad day the chance to change." – Discord senior director of policy Savannah Badalich explains the company's new content moderation policies, which will avoid permanent bans in an attempt to rehabilitate bad actors.

Wow, that sounds great. I wonder if anyone has ever tried this before.

QUOTE | "98% of our players are actually very good. What we're seeing is they all have bad days. That's where your toxicity comes from." – In 2013, Riot Games lead designer of social systems Jeffrey Lin explains why the League of Legends developer tried to reform toxic players instead of banning them.

Uh-huh. And how did that go?

STAT | 81% - The percentage of League of Legends players in the Anti-Defamation League's 2022 Hate and Harassment Online survey who reported experiencing harassment in the game, tied for the fourth worst game among the 20 major titles the ADL looked at. Riot's Valorant was the second worst, with 84% of players reporting harassment.

Spare the rod and spoil the manchild, I guess.

Perhaps more concerning is that this is a change in policy for Discord, which certainly suggests it was more active about banning toxic users in the past, even though we have pretty