Welcome back to Trust & Safety Lately,your monthly recap of all things trust & safety with a particular focus on the gaming industry.
The Modulate team is back from GDC 2024 in one piece -- whew! Before we dive into March's trust & safety news, check out this update from Rec Room on the state of voice moderation. Spoiler alert: content moderation works! Plus, tune into Ctrl-Alt-Speech, a new podcast about online speech covering regulations, tech, content moderation, and current events impacting trust & safety.
Now for this month's issue of Trust & Safety Lately:
🤔 An Old Challenge Needs New Solutions
📈 T&S Market Research Report
📜 KOSA Continued
💰 Rags to IPO Riches: A Reddit Story
☣️ Rated T for Toxic?
✂️ Big Tech Trims Trust & Safety
💞 Match Group's New Head of Trust & Safety
🎮 Gaming Safety Coalition
Let's get into it! 🔸
Data and Reports
🤔 An Old Challenge Needs New Solutions
The Deloitte Center for Technology, Media & Telecommunications published the 2024 Digital Media Trends Report, which outlines an age-old and well-known issue in gaming:
"57% of the women who responded and 53% of men agreed that games publishers should do more to tackle harassment within their titles."
The Deloitte report on gaming goes on to suggest what games publishers can do to boost their audience engagement:
"Live service games are dominated by men. How can services bring more women in? With better moderation in live service social games, more representation of women from studios and brands, more support for women game streamers, and more non-gaming live events that reach broader demographics."
GamesIndustry.biz reports on the survey results and points to differences in perception and interpretation of gameplay experience by gender:
"30% of male players believe that bullying can be considered as part of the gaming experience, compared to 19% of women.."
📈 T&S Market Research
Duco Experts published a thorough Trust & Safety market report outlining the impact that effective T&S practices and policies have in fueling organic user growth, advertising revenue, and the overall bottom line. The report also lays out the growth potential of trust and safety services and especially trust and safety tech (thanks to AI developments) in the coming years:
"However, T&S software solutions, facilitated by evolving AI capabilities, are poised to rapidly capture human-powered outsourced services market share at a yearly rate of 4% for the Tech Giants and 10% for the Enterprise and Mid-Market segments - growing the T&S software TAM from $7.4B to $15.4B, while the T&S services TAM only grows from $17.3B to $17.5B by 2028."
Industry News
📜 KOSA Continued
The fight around the Kids Online Safety Act continues as the US bill received enough votes to move on from the Senate. Opponents to the current form of the bill argue that, despite recent revisions intended to clarify ambiguous language, it could be used by states (particularly conservative states) to target LGBTQ+ populations due to open-ended definitions of what types of content should be considered harmful for children.
Following Reddit's IPO announcement, Kevin Roose at The New York Times reports on the transformation of Reddit from a seedy forum site to (mostly) trusted news site. Roose points to content moderation practices as the real harbinger of Reddit's success -- in particular:
1. Moderating bad spaces, not bad individuals
2. Empowering volunteer moderators with tools like Automoderator
3. Enforcing behavior, not morals
☣️ Rated T for Toxic?
Melanin Gamers released a community-sourced Toxicity Rating tool that aggregates hundreds of survey responses on perceived toxicity in popular games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Call of Duty. Anyone can complete the survey to contribute to the new tool.
Last week, NBC News reported on other tech giants like X, Snap, and Discord also cutting their trust & safety teams in the last year. For example:
"Discord said it had 22 full-time employees devoted to trust and safety in 2019. By 2023, Discord said that team had grown to 90 employees. In 2024, after the company went through a round of layoffs, the team shrunk to a pre-2021 size of 74 full-time employees."
💞 Match Group's New Head of Trust & Safety
Since leaving Twitter a little more than a year ago, the platform's former Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth had taken a bit of a break from the internet. That is, until two weeks ago when he joined Match Group as their new Head of Trust & Safety. Lauren Goode at Wired interviewed Roth on his plans for user safety, pain points in protecting marginalized users, and keeping kids off the platform.
🎮 Meet the Gaming Safety Coalition
Modulate, Keywords Studios, ActiveFence and Take This have teamed up to create the Gaming Safety Coalition, a new partnership founded to advance the safety, integrity, and well-being of online gaming communities. Check out the Coalition's white paper on content moderation best practices that combine the best of AI and human experience. Stay in touch to get updates this summer on how to get involved.
Industry Events
Modulate is heading to Reboot Develop Blue in Dubrovnik, Croatia this month. Reach out to connect!
GamesBeat Summit brings together leaders across the spectrum of the video game industry ecosystem including entrepreneurs, talent, anchor corporations, support organizations, investment capital, and innovation enablers.
Hosted by the Trust & Safety Professionals Association, this year's TrustCon will be here before you know it. You can register now -- keep an eye out for the full lineup of speakers and talks coming later this year.
Just announced, the third annual Trust & Safety Research Conference is back! The conference brings together trust and safety researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, civil society, and government. Submit proposals by April 30 and register beginning June 2024.
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