Microsoft’s latest Xbox transparency report—the company’s third public look at enforcement of its community standards—is the first to include a section on “advancing content moderation and platform safety with AI.” And that report specifically calls out two tools that the company says “enable us to achieve greater scale, elevate the capabilities of our human moderators, and reduce exposure to sensitive content.”
Microsoft says many of its Xbox safety systems are now powered by Community Sift, a moderation tool created by Microsoft subsidiary TwoHat. Among the “billions of human interactions” the Community Sift system has filtered this year are “over 36 million” Xbox player reports in 22 languages, according to the Microsoft report. The Community Sift system evaluates those player reports to see which ones need further attention from a human moderator.
That new filtering system hasn’t had an apparent effect on the total number of “reactive” enforcement actions (i.e., those in response to a player report) Microsoft has undertaken in recent months, though. The 2.47 million such enforcement actions taken in the first half of 2023 were down slightly from the 2.53 million enforcement actions in the first half of 2022. But that enforcement number now represents a larger proportion of the total number of player reports, which shrank from 33.08 million in early 2022 to 27.31 million in early 2023 (both numbers are way down from 52.05 million player reports issued in the first half of 2021).
The shrinking number of player reports may be partly due to an increase in “proactive” enforcement, which Microsoft undertakes before any player has had a chance to report a problem. To aid in this process, Microsoft says it’s using the Turing Bletchley v3 AI model, an updated version of a tool Microsoft first launched in 2021.
