Must Read: Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, Proposes Dangerous Social Concept

I don’t normally do video game stuff, but this goes beyond video games. It goes way beyond gaming. And it’s dangerous.

Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox at Microsoft, did an interview with the New York Times in which he advocated for cross-platform bans. To put that in laymen terms, if you are punished online in one area of the internet, it should apply across the internet. In practicality, this would mean that if you are punished for something in Rocket League on Playstation 5… and you get a five-day ban… you’re also banned for five days from your Xbox, from your Nintendo Switch, from your virtual reality headset. He even proposes you could be banned from programs on your PC. And while you might think that’s all gaming stuff, it’s ridiculously dangerous because what is to stop you from being banned from interactive media because you posted something a censor shot down on Facebook or Twitter?

Something I would love us to be able to do–this is a hard one as an industry–is when somebody gets banned in one of our networks, is there a way for us to ban them across other networks?

— Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, to the New York Times

The idea of cross-platform punishments is better termed “centralized censorship”. While it might deter a twelve year old from spouting vulgarities online, the danger is far too significant to implement. Consumers and citizens of free nations should loudly decry this insane concept.

Many years ago, a friend of mine pointed out bad behavior directly to Activision Blizzard. In response, she was suspended from her forum account for two weeks, likely at the call of a very young community manager or moderator. There was no reasonable appeal process for this and we now know the company was in charge of horrific behavior behind the scenes. In this “centralized censorship” model that Spencer is recommending, she would have been locked out of all her platforms for those two weeks.

We’ve also seen in the past two years that the censors are often wrong. Censorship is a very difficult task, and opens the door to authoritarian means for stopping free speech. Centralizing that censorship so that you can punish wrong-think across a plethora of platforms is a way that authorities could go beyond cancelling people on social media accounts. They could invoke digital banishment. What is to stop Microsoft from wrongly banning a player forever and then having them also be banned from all other platforms for other. This is a door for evil and we should shut it with all due force. Whatever good could come from it is minuscule in comparison to the danger.

Phil Spencer’s statement should be condemned in the very strongest way possible. This is how you give rise to corporate oligarchy, technocratic rule. I’ll leave the article with a quote from the Project Lead for the original World of Warcraft:

Now your entire game library, from Xbox to Steam, all of your games, can be taken away because of one mistake on one game, or one false flag.

Madness.

— Grummz (@Grummz) January 11, 2022

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