Tonight on GeekNights, we review the latest (free-to-play) from Zachtronics with NERTS! Online. It's a live online implementation of the classic card game Nerts, and is worth your while. In the news, a Republican mob led by disgraced president Donald Trump stormed the capitol in an ongoing coup attempt. Twitch rightly removes the PogChamp emote after the person it's based on supported this coup. Twitch replaced the PogChamp with a very cool idea that also reminded us just how racist gamers are. Thankfully, the first new PogChamp is a champ. LucasArts is basically back with LucasFilm Games, and they have announced a nazi-fighting game that we're all excited about. We also have a trailer for Bowser's Fury.
Twitch has their new-ish pretty good TOS, but all this harassment that still exists. It suggests they aren’t enforcing it, and aren’t dropping perma-ban hammers on enough accounts. It’s also perhaps too easy for people to get new accounts.
Well, that’s a technical problem. Even if the big platforms decided to have reciprocal ban lists, people sign up with different emails and such.
And even then, making people certifiably and uniquely identify themselves doesn’t solve the problem.
In South Korea people have to use their unique government ID number to sign up for many/most online services. If they just comment on a news article, then the news site 100% knows their true identity, and other users might know it as well if the service chooses to reveal it.
They also have laws that make online harassment actually illegal, and people get sued and face actual consequences for it. Like, you can just make a post insulting some celebrity saying they are ugly or something, and you can get ruined.
All that hasn’t solved the problem for them. Awful people posting awful shit online is still rampant.
It would be a start for Twitch to accept reports of harassment on other platforms of their users, and to aggressively and actively enforce their own ToS on their own platform.
Analyze past chat traffic to flag likely racist content, prioritize human review of the top 100,000 accounts flagged, and issue retroactive summary bans.
