Microsoft's Toulouse: Why I suspended an Xbox Live user for reciting the Declaration of Independence
The director of policy and enforcement for Xbox LIVE, Toulouse leads an undercover team that monitors the service for behavior that violates the game's terms of use and code of conduct.
Minor infractions result in a virtual time-out. A major faux pas -- like repeatedly getting naked on camera -- can warrant suspension of your console.
I spoke with Toulouse last week to get the scoop on bad behavior on the service -- including the time he banned a user for reciting his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
You’re in charge of policing Xbox LIVE. Explain how you do that.
The first way is by relying on our community. When they see someone cheating or using bad language, or a gamertag is offensive, they make a complaint. We review their complaints and actively police the service 365 days a year. We play games with customers and look for bad behavior. You never know when you’ll encounter one of these gamers.
So you’re like undercover cops?
We’re really just there to enforce the terms of use. We’re not there to be heavy handed.
How many do you have on your team?
It grows and shrinks on demand. We might need more people at Christmas time, when there’s a surge of growth. We experience a small surge in summer. I have a core team of about a dozen in Redmond, and several dozen around the world who assist us in policing the service. They’re all Xbox employees.
How do you decide what kind of behavior gets punished?
My team is governed by Section 5 of the terms of use. Our code of conduct says what you can and can’t do.
There’s some interesting scenarios that you run into. What’s the edge between someone being offended but not breaking the terms of use? A political statement, for example, “I don’t like liberals,” but they’re not espousing hate or violence. So there are the rules, and then the expertise that my team has developed to decide if something is a violation.
Our goal is to be there when our customers let us know we need to be.
If someone shoots you and you blurt out one bad word, that’s an instance where we might not take action. But if it’s happening repeatedly, or if the first word you blurt out is racial or homophobic speech, then we’d step in.
How many complaints do you get?
It changes as the subscriber base changes. We have over 23 million on the service now. Our complaints are far less than 1 percent of our total subscribers on the system at any one time.
Any off-the-wall complaints?
Ninety-nine percent are standard. Occasionally you run into unusual situations that make you scratch your head.
I was playing Shadowrun, which is a team-oriented game, six on six. Unfortunately, one of our teammates was reading the Declaration of Independence over and over again into his microphone. The content is of course not offensive, but his reading was disrupting our ability to work with our teammates. Maybe he was working for the other team.
I told him he was violating one of the terms of conduct--do not disrupt the game play of others. So I issued a communication suspension, which automatically muted him for one day.
Does bad behavior come more from kids or grown-ups?
It comes more from the in-between group—between 13 and 25, when you’re at an age when you’re learning how to interact. One of the challenges is anonymity in the Internet, which can lead to people thinking there’s not consequences for their actions.
Do you ever have to get law enforcement involved?
We have a great system with law enforcement. There are times we have to work with them. The police know how to contact us.
OK, I’ve got to ask. How many hours a week do you play games?
Definitely I’d caveat this statement that I’m paid to do it. But I’d say I spend easily 20 hours a week gaming in the system. Probably half of that is active policing. The other half is looking for unexpected situations, for example, a game is released and a bug allows for cheating.
So I’m looking for situations you can’t know about until the game’s out. And that’s also in our terms of use—you can’t use a bug or glitch in the game to gain advantage.
What are the most common punishments?
The most common thing we do is issue communication suspensions or account suspensions and gamertag changes. Once you hand them that suspension, they typically learn their lesson. We do issue permanent suspensions, for the account or the console. Fraud will immediately cause a suspension. Or nudity.
We have a camera that allows for video interaction so players can see each other, like in Texas Hold’em. If there’s any nudity, there’s a permanent ban on that account. If they sign up a new account and are naked on the camera, that might result in a console suspension, so they can’t create a new account. That’s rare.
What’s the role of parents in enforcement?
We want to protect all our customers, but I view a lot of what my team does as protecting children. If a parent comes to me and says I can’t set up the tools because it’s too complex, I go back to my team and say we need to make it easier.
We do three things: provide the tools in the software; educate parents on how to integrate gaming into a healthy lifestyle (see GetGameSmart); and step in to enforce when we have to.
One thing for parents to understand is that the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) ratings are for the single-player experience. You can pick up an E-rated title and then go onto your Xbox and run into a jerk. The parent can restrict who the kid talks to and what games he plays. There’s even a nifty timer.
When I was growing up and my mom wanted to restrict my time, she’d basically take away the power cord. Now you can set it for 60 minutes. But if you haven’t set up all these things for your child, the child has the keys to the kingdom.
Before this job, you were the communications manager in Microsoft’s Security Response Center, helping protect users from viruses or phishing attacks. How does that help you with Xbox LIVE enforcement?
That side [of me] that looks at something pretty cool and thinks, how can that be misused? Developers are awesome at coming up with cool features, but I love to remind them, let’s have a plan to respond if it’s used in an unexpected way.
For example, we added a feature a few years ago called Friends. It’s like your IM list or Facebook friends. We discovered people were finding it hard to find their friends, so a developer came up with a Friends of Friends feature so you could see each other’s friends.
But what about the case of two friends on a list, and they’re divorced, and they don’t want any interaction? So we came up with a way to block that feature and before we even pushed it out, we communicated to everyone that you could check this box, and Friends of Friends won’t be turned on.
What’s the most challenging part of your job?
Keeping up with and ahead of the transformation of language that the Internet has provided us. If you look at texting, lingo, slang and the substitution of letters for words, you can see that there might be a case where people use that to try to get around what we block.
I spend a lot of time on UrbanDictionary.com, Wikipedia, Google, just looking for trends in language. Language is changing now faster than at any other time.
Ninety-nine percent is good. I have to keep an eye out for the 1 percent that’s bad.
Editor's note: The original headline of this post used the word "banned" instead of "suspended." Despite the fact that both words mean "to prohibit," we have changed it to clear up any confusion over the permanence of the infraction.