An update posted on the official Call of Duty website has revealed that more than 350,000 players have been banned for racist and toxic behaviour in the past year.
The total came from four of the latest iterations of Activision’s immensely popular first-person shooter series, which includes Warzone, Modern Warfare, Black Ops Cold War and Call of Duty: Mobile.
The bans were a result of player-submitted reports and an “extensive review” of a database of players’ display names.
“There’s no place for toxic behaviour, hate speech or harassment of any kind in our games or our society,” wrote the Call of Duty team in the update.
“Our goal is to give players the tools needed to manage their own gameplay experience, combined with an enforcement approach that addresses hate speech, racism, sexism and harassment.”
In their effort to tackle inappropriate and abusive behaviours, a number of measures designed to combat the problem were also detailed.
These include software to recognise offensive text chats sent in-game, filtering of usernames, tags and profile information as well as a commitment to improving the technologies used to do this.
“We know we have a long way to go to reach our goals. This is just the start. Addressing this is an ongoing commitment that we will not waver from,” the post continued.
This follows an update earlier in the year which confirmed more than 300,000 accounts, with 60,000 in a single day, had been banned for cheating in the popular Warzone battle-royale mode alone.
Featured image credit: Call of Duty / Activision
Politics, Philosophy and Economics student at the University of Stirling. Media Officer for Stirling Students' Union and Secretary of Brig Newspaper.
