If you’ve spent enough time playing games online, you’ve probably seen or experienced some form of hate speech. Some communities are more toxic than others, but almost all are plagued by at least a degree of hate speech. Often times hate speech is spewed in a joking, juvenile manner. Other times it’s filled with pure vitriol and arrogance. Either way, people and governments around the world are getting tired of it.

The EU recently gave social media companies what amounts to a final warning. Their ultimatum is this: rid your sites of hate speech or face stiff consequences.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter have been working hard to improve the way they deal with hate speech, but according to the EU, it isn’t enough. Mariya Gabriel, a top EU official in charge of digital economy and society, recently said “The situation is not sustainable: in more than 28% of cases, it takes more than one week for online platforms to take down illegal content.”

This sort of language should have game developers nervous. Online video games are riddled with hate speech and it’s seemingly only a matter of time until regulators broaden their focus to include gaming.

The thing is, hate speech can be absurdly hard to quantify. When do words become hate speech? When does casual trash talk turn into unacceptable language? Some instances of hate speech are easy to point out. Nazi propaganda and race-based nationalism are easy to point to and say ‘yeah, that’s hate speech.’ But where is the fine-line drawn and who gets to draw it?

As a gamer, you can almost always mute players and/or report them. You can also tell them to ‘Shut the f*@k up,” but that usually doesn’t work. There are things you can do on a personal level to shield yourself from hate speech, but for companies it’s a much more difficult endeavor. They have to walk a tightrope between free speech and hate speech.

Go too far with censorship and you’re in a boat load of trouble. Don’t go far enough and you’re up a creek without a paddle.

Plus, there’s no strong precedence out there. The gaming industry can’t look to any other industry and say ‘you guys are doing it right, we’re going to emulate you.’ No one has hate speech and censorship figured out in the modern age. Even Riot, one of the biggest gaming companies around, can’t get it figured out. We recently covered two instances of community toxicity with them, one we’re they’re doing something right and one we’re they’re doing something wrong.

So that’s where we’re at. No one has the answers, or at least no one who has a loud enough voice. So we ask you now, readers of EKGaming, what can developers do about online hate speech?

Let us know what you think in the comments or drop us a line on social media, you can even reach out to us by email or on discord.