Xbox suspends nearly 5 million accounts in first six months of 2022

Today, Xbox released its first transparency report, detailing the steps Microsoft is taking to protect gamers from a variety of online threats, including malicious internet saboteurs and bad behavior by other gamers. Things like this were previously detailed in Microsoft’s Digital Security Content report, but given Xbox’s continued growth, it makes more sense to separate them into their own separate report.

Also, Microsoft has some good news for us in some interesting stats. But first there are statistics. Microsoft took a total of 7.31 million “enforcement actions” between January 1 and June 30, 2022. Of these enforcement actions, 4.5 million resulted in the suspension or permanent deactivation of a player’s account, while 196,000 demanded the removal of content posted by the account. In total, 2.43 million incidents required content removal and account suspension.

Overall, the number of enforcement actions has increased significantly compared to around 4 million in the same period in 2021. However, Microsoft sees this as a positive, as these increased bans are largely driven by new “active” law enforcement technology that detects and removes inauthentic gamer accounts before they spread malicious information on the Xbox network.

Keeping you informed starts with full-on transparency 💚 read all about our Community Safety Approach in our latest blog post here: https://t.co/p31NF8ioss

— Xbox (@Xbox) November 14, 2022

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Microsoft doesn’t elaborate on what exactly this proactive technique is (perhaps to keep it a secret from those who wish to bypass it), but they do say it’s primarily used to get rid of “inauthentic” accounts – which are used with Bots, spammers and fake accounts to increase one’s follower count.

Of the nearly 7 million banned accounts, 4.33 million were banned for violations such as spam, piracy, phishing, hacking, or in-game cheating. Since then, 1.05 million accounts have been banned for pornography and 814,000 accounts have been banned for pornography. Harassment and bullying came in fourth with 759,000 account suspensions, and hate speech resulted in 211,000 account bans.

The record here is that all of these active bans may have reduced the number of player-reported violations considerably, from 52.05 million in the six months of 2021 to 33.08 million between January and June 2022.