Today, November 20, 2020 – In a strange and Orwellian move, Microsoft has decided to insert moderators to observe chats for all players with paid subscriptions on it’s Minecraft Realms Servers.
They will be introducing permanent bans as well as new temporary bans on any Realms subscribers who violate the new “Safe Space” policies that are coming.
Watching everyone’s chats and including moderators would seem safe space culture enough, but they are taking it even a step farther and introducing algorithms on their servers that will search for in games signs and quill books. That seems very invasive to the whole idea of someone paying for a server subscription to play Minecraft Bedrock with their friends, to start censoring public discourse even to the degree of introducing censorship to the in game created signs and books.
As an Minecraft Adventure Creator, focused on present day cultural events, news media rage and social justice politics, it seems like a highly Twitter-like move. What kind of politics and politically correct culture will this lead to? Will they ban adventures, worlds and Realms subscribes because we resist the claims of Climate Change? Will they begin banning players if they like Donald Trump and not Joe Biden? Will they ban and censors players who say they refuse to wear a mask? Exactly how deep will they take this censorship?
Time will tell, but its a scary thought to know that free speech is now dead even in Minecraft. Long live Minecraft Realms! The server is dead.
I could see this being useful in some specific circumstances: If it was opt-in and configurable (i.e. the moderation rules were decided by the realm renter, not Microsoft).
In any case the article linked doesn’t seem to exist anymore, so I can’t say what I make of the original announcement.