Combating Hateful Speech and Harassment in Jackbox Games

While making party games can feel somewhat unimportant right now, it does seem appropriate to acknowledge how our games have been used to spread bigotry and racism and what we intend to do about it. 

When we started development on Quiplash 3, one of our top priorities was adding features to combat hateful, derogatory content appearing in our games. Unfortunately, the same mechanics that make our games personal and engaging can also be used to demean and harass. We’ve heard from too many streamers who have flat-out quit playing Jackbox Games on their channels due to racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise toxic user-submitted content. 

Over the past several years we have added features like manual censoring, Twitch login, and room locking in an attempt to mitigate harassment, but it is still far too easy to inject hateful messages into a game, especially on streaming platforms.

Quiplash 3 will be the first Jackbox Games title to include full content moderation that will allow streamers and/or mods to reject content before it is ever seen by anyone else. In addition, moderators will not need to be a player in the game, but will moderate content using a separate view. 

Over the last few days, we have also decided to add automatic content filtering to The Jackbox Party Pack 7. Unlike active moderation, when content filtering is on, certain words or phrases will automatically get rejected. Will it stop everything? No. But many of the conversations we’ve had this week have brought us to the conclusion that if we can take a step in the right direction, even if it’s a small step, we should take it.

We will share more information as development continues. In the meantime, we are always interested in hearing what would help you feel safer playing Jackbox Games. If you have any comments or questions, please share them on Discord, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, or via our support site.