With a push further into gaming and streaming, Facebook has been pushed to address trolling and anti-social social behaviour which have become common in a few corners of the gaming community. Even though some of these issues are due to the varying tolerance within the different groups, there exist unclear boundaries between each, according to Social Media Today.
“While our Community Standards protect against the most egregious harms like hate speech and terrorism, sometimes all it takes is one person being rude, mean or simply disruptive to ruin a conversation for everyone,” according to Facebook. “And what may be considered competitive banter in one streaming community, might be considered toxic in another.”
Facebook has begun working with the Fair Play Alliance, which is a coalition of game companies that are working to encourage healthy communities in online gaming, in order to establish a new set of rules that gaming creators and moderators can apply to set clear guidelines around their gamin streams and discussions. This is how Facebook aims to address the latter point made in their statement.
“People form communities over a shared love of gaming, but we know some groups of people, like women, can be targets of negative, hurtful stereotypes – so, rules like “Be Accepting” and “Respect Boundaries” can help maintain a positive environment for everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or ability. Similarly, “Don’t Criticize” can help newer players feel welcome. The rules will promote inclusion and respect to help people feel safe sharing their voice.”
These rules are not compulsory; however, they are an option to be set by gaming creators if they want to establish more definitive parameters within their communities, according to Social Media Today. The creators will be able to access them via a new “Chat Rules” button in the streamer dashboard before they go live.
Once a streamer taps on “Chat Rules” they will be able to select from a variety of options in a list of gaming-specific rules for their community. They will also be able to add custom descriptions about their streams to set a clearer expectation around the type of conversation they want to create.
“Once a creator selects rules from the Chat Rules section of the streamer dashboard, fans will be asked to accept the rules before they’re allowed to leave a comment,” according to Facebook.
In addition to this feature, Facebook has also improved its comment removals process so that they will disappear from the stream quicker, while the moderators will also have access to a new moderation dashboard within streams where they will be able to give fans feedback as to why their content of comments were removed.
These new tools will be available to a selected group of game streamers at first, before it is expanded in the future. Facebook has been making a bigger push towards gaming recently as they have dedicated game streamer programs and revenue-sharing options to create incentives for their participation.
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