Because we can type and say anything we want online and hide behind a screen name, it’s easy to say things that we wouldn’t normally say to someone else in real-life. However this is a culture that needs to change and so far we’ve seen companies such as Twitter take steps to help combat online trolls.Recently Blizzard has decided to throw their hat in the ring as well to help combat harassment gamers might face on popular streaming service, Twitch. Speaking to Polygon, Blizzard’s president Mike Morhaime said that the company was looking into ways that they might be able to help prevent such behavior from happening again in the future.
According to Morhaime, “To that end, we’re investigating a pilot program that Twitch has in the works to streamline moderation and combat ban evasion. We’re also updating our esports tournament partner policies with a stronger system of checks, balances, and repercussions to provide a better chat experience around our content.”
For those unfamiliar, this stemmed from the DreamHack event last week in which a Hearthstone player by the name of TerrenceM was subject to abusive and racist comments on Twitch whilst he competed, thus prompting Blizzard to look into the matter to help prevent future incidents from happening again.
Will they be successful? We suppose right now the only way would be to try and catch the perpetrators after they’ve done it by banning or kicking them off, but by then it might be too late, but we guess we’ll just have to wait and see what Blizzard can come up with.
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