Xbox suspended nearly 7 million accounts in the first half of 2022

Xbox published its first-ever digital transparency report on Monday, revealing a spike in the number of accounts suspended for inauthentic behavior and other violations. While the document tackles the company’s “reactive” and “proactive” approaches in detecting violators, Xbox emphasized how the latter greatly contributed to detecting millions of bot accounts in the first six months of 2022 alone.

Between last January and June, Xbox relied on proactive and reactive methods that helped it detect and take action against a total of 7.31 million accounts that violated community guidelines. “Reactive” moderation refers to the conventional player reporting system. But Xbox says its proactive actions against bot accounts and cheaters are in place so that legitimate players will not have to encounter them at all.

Xbox’s number of recorded flagged accounts in January-June 2022 was the highest in the last two years. It was mostly due to the spike in accounts (4.78 million) automatically detected through the company’s proactive process.

“For years at Xbox, we’ve been using a set of content moderation technologies to proactively help us address policy-violating text, images, and video shared by players on Xbox,” Xbox said in the report. “This automation helps to find resolution sooner, reduce the need for human review, and further reduce the impact of toxic content on human moderators.”

There was not a significant change in the number of accounts suspended through Xbox’s reactive system. But it could be due to a 36% decline in the player reports Xbox received in January-June 2021.

Out of the 7.31 million accounts that received "enforcements" (a.k.a. punishments) from Xbox, 6.93 million of these accounts received suspensions. Cheating and inauthentic behavior are the leading violations committed by 4.33 million accounts in the first half of the year. The use of profanity comes second (1.05 million accounts), while sharing adult sexual content is third (814,000 accounts) in the policy areas violated the most by accounts suspended by Xbox.

The company allows suspended users to file an appeal and reinstate their accounts, but Xbox does not seem too generous in granting such requests. Out of the 151,000 appeals Xbox received in the same period, it only reinstated 6% or a measly 9,250 accounts.

Photo by Louis-Philippe Poitras on Unsplash