The suggestions included two-factor authentication for EA accounts, which could both improve overall security and discourage banned players from quickly creating new accounts. Players also told the company it could alert players if a report leads to action, use AI to moderate chats and find ways to improve cultural representation in game characters.

The Player Council could be busy. EA expects there to be “several opportunities and events” involving the council throughout a given year. This also isn’t the only way the company is teaming with the community. We wouldn’t expect rapid progress at this stage — it’s one thing to talk about ideas, it’s another to implement them. This is a start, though, and it could reduce the amount of grief players get when they’re simply trying to have a good time.

As such, Spencer wrote, “gaming must promote and protect the safety of all. […] It’s essential that we embrace our role and take responsibility for creating safe gaming.” Building and protecting a healthy community is shared, essential work, he said, and he outlined a number of commitments to help towards that goal.

Microsoft and the Xbox team will be “vigilant, proactive and swift” with regards to potential abuse and misuse on the Xbox platform and will act to fix problems swiftly. They have updated the Xbox Community Standards to lay out how everyone should play a role in keeping gaming a safe environment, and detail the repercussions for those who don’t abide by the standards. The revamped standards spell out the differences between trash talk and harassment, for instance. “We are also intent on expanding the composition of our safety team so wide-ranging perspectives can help us identify future safety problems and solutions,” Spencer wrote.

From this summer, Club community managers will have expanded moderation tools to ensure there are safe places for players to talk about games. Additional content moderation features will roll out for all Xbox Live users by the end of the year, while Spencer highlighted that child and teen accounts can help parents and guardians protect their youngsters.

A “For Everyone” section was recently added to the Xbox website that details safety, inclusivity and accessibility features across the platform. Microsoft also plans to share safety, security and privacy insights and best practices with other players in the industry. Moderation, user research, data science and other teams are already collaborating with external partners. “We’re innovating now in these and other concrete ways to reduce, filter and develop a shared understanding of toxic experiences, and to ultimately put our community of gamers, and their parents or guardians, in control of their own experiences,” Spencer wrote.

“Scores” of YouTube and Google employees noted their concerns about the “mass of false, incendiary and toxic content” over the last few years. Many suggested changes to YouTube executives or tracked the prevalence and popularity of toxic videos to show senior management the extent of the problem. However, the word reportedly came from on high to stay the course in the hopes of avoiding a dip in engagement metrics.

YouTube employees have wrestled with executives’ approach to the platform’s problems. Five senior staff members who left the company over the last couple of years claimed YouTube’s long-standing “inability to tame extreme, disturbing videos” was why they departed.

Still, outlandish content can draw attention, potentially leading to significant advertising revenue. Parent company Alphabet typically doesn’t disclose YouTube revenue numbers in earnings reports, though the video-sharing platform is estimated to pull in north of $16 billion per year.

A spokeswoman refuted some of the report’s claims, including that CEO Susan Wojcicki “is inattentive to these issues and that the company prioritizes engagement above all else,” according to Bloomberg.

The service has been focused on finding solutions for some of its “toughest content challenges” over the last two years, a spokesperson told Engadget in a statement. Those measures include “updating our recommendations system to prevent the spread of harmful misinformation, improving the news experience on YouTube, bringing the number of people focused on content issues across Google to 10,000, investing in machine learning to be able to more quickly find and remove violative content, and reviewing and updating our policies.”

Yet several years before YouTube pledged to stop recommending conspiracy videos, a privacy engineer suggested that videos skirting the edges of the site’s content policies shouldn’t be included in recommendations. His proposal was rejected at the time, according to the report, though YouTube eventually adopted the idea this January. YouTube has added other measures to combat false content, including information panels on video pages and search results that offer truthful information on sensitive or controversial topics.

Meanwhile, Motherboard reports white nationalist and neo-Nazi propaganda videos are freely available on YouTube. The publication shared some examples with the service, which removed advertising from them, added content warnings and made sure they didn’t appear in recommendations. But the videos are still on YouTube, and you can view them via search results.

The company even set up a server that helped it find out if players saw the endorsement system as responsible for the drop in hostile behavior, and the perception was “close” to reality, Miller said.

This isn’t to say that Blizzard’s achievement is flawless. It’s not clear how many instances of toxic behavior there are, and a 40 percent dip still leaves a lot of players causing grief. Still, it’s a start — and it might show other game developers how they can create a welcoming environment by changing attitudes, not just by banning offenders.