Microsoft admits it banned more than 7 million Xbox live accounts in 6 months
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Since early 2022, Microsoft has banned more than 7 million Xbox accounts for violating Community Guidelines.
It’s not all plain sailing for those lucky enough to game on the Xbox Series X. While Microsoft released its first Digital Transparency Report (opens in new tab)turns out Microsoft may have been a little trigger happy.
From January to June 2022, Microsoft banned a total of 7.21 million Xbox accounts. 4.78 million of these bans were proactive and 2.53 million were reactive. This is more than the total number of bans for the entire year 2021, which is 6.72 million.
The main difference between proactive and reactive is that proactive ban comes before someone reported an account, and reactive comes after report. You would think that with the growing number of users on Xbox Live, the reactive ban stat would increase. But this is not the case.
Bad reputation
It turns out that proactive bans have increased tenfold since the beginning of the year. At first glance, this may seem like an overreaction or even a mistake on Microsoft’s part, but it’s actually a good decision. Unfortunately, over the past decade or so, Xbox Live has built up a rather unfair reputation as an extremely toxic platform.
In reality, all over the internet is pretty toxic. While Xbox Live is no angel, it is no different from other platforms that rely on online user interaction. However, this has not prevented the stereotype from spreading.
Whether it’s a mass culling of bills or the implementation of chat filters to prevent harassment (opens in new tab). Microsoft is always trying to make its platform a better place for everyone to fight this unfair stereotype. This recent turn of events is therefore fully in line with his previous attempts to refresh the platform.
Good news
As it turns out, many of the proactively banned accounts were clearly disruptive to the platform. A further breakdown of Microsoft’s report sees 199,000 proactive bans due to sexual content, 54,000 for bullying or harassment, and 87,000 for fraud. Even if no one reported these accounts, no one will miss them any time soon.
Any attempt to make a platform more fun to work with is a step in the right direction. While you may consider proactive bans unfair since no reports have been made against them, Microsoft may need to reinforce this mindset in the future.
Apparently, the accounts that were banned for phishing, piracy, and account tampering were 100% the result of Microsoft being proactive and not reacting to players reporting issues.
With fewer players reporting account issues, Microsoft needs to step up its game to keep it clean. Otherwise, the platform would slowly rot and become more toxic. Just because players don’t report problems doesn’t mean there aren’t any.