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Mike Morhaime on Combating Racism in Hearthstone
There's been a lot of discussion regarding the recent DreamHack Austin Hearthstone event, but unfortunately not all of it has been positive. During the event, Twitch chat was filled with blatant racism during matches featuring Hearthstone Pro, Terrence Miller, which was not moderated well.
Today, Mike Morhaime, Blizzard Entertainment's President and CEO, issued a statement about the event and clarified that the company is investigating ways to deal with discriminatory behaviour in the future.
- The use of a Twitch pilot program to help moderate streams/ban evades is being looked into.
- Esports tournament partner policies will have stricter checks and penalties to provide a better chat experience.
Quote from Mike MorhaimeWe’re extremely disappointed by the hateful, offensive language used by some of the online viewers during the DreamHack Austin event the weekend before last. One of our company values is “Play Nice; Play Fair”; we feel there’s no place for racism, sexism, harassment, or other discriminatory behavior, in or outside of the gaming community. This is obviously a larger, societal problem that affects us on many levels. We can only hope that when instances like this come to light it encourages people to be more thoughtful and positive, and to fully reject mean-spirited commentary, whether within themselves or from their fellow gamers.To help combat this type of behavior during live events, we’ve reached out to players, streamers, and moderators, along with partners like Twitch, DreamHack, and others, to get consensus and collaborate on what to do differently moving forward. 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.
We believe these are important steps to take to help address the related issues, but we acknowledge that they only address part of the problem. This is ultimately an industry-wide issue, and it will take all of us to make a real impact.
Additionally, GamesBeat reached out to Twitch who had the following to say.
Quote from TwitchWe take harassment very seriously and understand how important this is for the entire Twitch community. We currently approach chat behavior by providing broadcasters tools, education, and autonomy to police their own channel. While in this instance the broadcaster was unable to fully prevent the described behavior, Twitch has a responsibility to broadcasters and players to provide a welcoming environment. As such, as Blizzard noted, we are exploring new tools and processes to increase awareness and mitigation of these issues, and will continue to take action against chatters who committed reported violations. We can’t comment on specifics at this time, but we do have a team dedicated to improving these aspects of the chat experience with a lot of internal progress already that we hope to share with the community soon.
You, sir, are a disgusting human being if you think people being hurt being called monkeys or thiefs because of their skin color is being "butt-hurted snowflakes".
Chakki made a great suggestion in value Town; for the people who do not have an account, they chat should be off and (my twist on it) even if they have an account, leave it turned off until the user decides to leave it on permanently or on their own basis. This definitely prevents people from seeing things said in chat. Moreover, it doesn't compromise the freedom of speech of people. I am for freedom of speech, but I also get really annoyed with the things that people say (at least the over the top stuff that is explicitly said to do harm). I know twitch chat is just twitch chat, but people should be more conscious and considerate about what they say.
an interesting suggestion
It's like the people at Blizzard have never read Twitch chat on any popular streams before, now they want to go all SJW on everyone. They just don't get it. Twitch chat has always been this way.
Just because they they should have taken a stand years ago, does not mean that now is too late to take action or that they should not.
Here is an article by a M:TG Professional about the simple reason why we have to fight racism, sexism and all the different forms of abuse, whether it is in Twitch Chat or other forums: Words Mean Things
He is reading WAY too deeply into slang.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences or the freedom to hurt people.
Racism and other forms of abuse hurt people, we should take that more seriously.
The fact that he was in jail does not invalidate his points. Especially since his crime is not related to the matter at hand.
Calling out racism and not allowing it to enter your surroundings is not fascism.The opposite is.
I need a safe space