A video clip (trigger warning) from a live stream on Twitch recently emerged on social media, where the streamer in question was threatened via an online multiplayer game's voice chat.

Threats of assault, including but not limited to threats of rape or sexual assault directed towards women, are not acceptable, and should not be accepted nor dismissed as "banter" or "trash talk".

We recognise that the technical challenge of policing voice chat is more difficult than policing text chat.

But there are some situations where evidence has been collected, and said evidence quite literally speaks for itself.

Provided there is unequivocal evidence, we the undersigned feel that players engaging in such behaviour should be permanently banned, not only from the game in question, but for this ban information to be automatically shared with the platform providing the game, other games by the same publisher, other publishers and other platforms, and potentially any relevant legal authorities.

This is an appeal to all publishers of multiplayer online games and the platforms that host them, to form an independent consortium to protect all players from such behaviour in voice chat, to take a strong position against this behaviour being allowed to get worse.

Image by Ronaldo F. Santos from Pixabay.