The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is recommending that Minecraft invest in its content moderation efforts and in creating more robust community guidelines after the organization studied three months of anonymized chat data from the game. The study, which was conducted in collaboration with Take This, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and GamerSafer, focused specifically on how Minecraft deals with hate speech.
The researchers chose Minecraft not just because it’s popular (though it certainly is, with 141 million active players) but also because, as the ADL puts it, the “decentralized, player-run nature of Minecraft Java edition provides a novel opportunity to assess hate and harassment in gaming spaces.” And though the ADL’s findings are specific to Minecraft, the recommendations do resonate across most online spaces.
