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Speaking with Kotaku about a recent blog post he wrote on making gaming a safe environment for everyone, Xbox head Phil Spencer said 'Xbox Live is not a free speech platform.'
'It is not a place where anybody can come and say anything. And as we’re working to ensure it’s a safe and inclusive environment for everybody, I don’t want to be opaque about it. I want to be out there front and center so that you understand our motivation.'
Spencer attributed some of the toxicity we all see online every day to the anonymity of the internet. Something that, the Xbox head described as 'a really difficult place to unlock.'
'One of the things we find in gaming that’s actually really helpful to us is that because your Xbox Live account has friends and identity and state, there seems to be—and it’s good—there seems to be a lot more care that a player takes in their identity and its reputation. Banning somebody on Twitter, it takes me five seconds to create another account.'
He continued, 'So when we think about our ability in the long run to actually create a system that actually has some amount of capability to actually impact behavior, we think the fact that our account has friends and history and relationships gives us a good relationship with a customer to actually impart some real rules and responsibilities. But I think it’s just as much about gaming as it is about a community online.'
I'd highly recommend reading the whole interview, as well as the piece that spawned it. It's clear that Spencer is an exec that actually wants to have an impact on video games, as well as at his employer.
