Call of Duty listens to you while you talk in private and this ban is the proof

The idea that the Call of Duty community is full of hate speech, screeching children, and harassment has been a constant for many years, even becoming somewhat of a meme. So when Activision announced last year that they would implement a new system to automatically ban harassers and toxic members of the community, the idea was well received. But now, it seems like players think they’ve gone too far, after finding out that this AI moderator is actually listening in on their voice chats, even when in private parties.

The surprise was shared on Reddit, ever since growing in attention with more and more players sharing their similar experiences. It was user r/Icy_Tangerine_6271 who posted about how after a night of playing, them and one of their friends he was playing with (in a private chat) received bans. “Played for a few hours last night with a couple friends. My friend and I (not the other one, only the two of us) received chat bans at the end of the night last night, riiiight before logging off,” they said. “We both got three day bans. I’m not sure what either of us said throughout the night, but my problem with this is mainly that we were in a private party with just the three of us.”

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“I can maybe understand moderating public lobby chat to “create a safe environment” or whatever, but when you start moderating and banning people over speech in their private parties, you’re going too far.”

Is Activision’s AI-Moderator spying on players?

So does this mean that Activision is actively listening to everything you say when playing Call of Duty? In August of 2023, the company announced they would be implementing ToxMod to the game. This is an AI-based detection system that listens in on in-game voice chat. According to the official announcement of this, the system is able to “identify in real-time and enforce against toxic speech—including hate speech, discriminatory language, harassment and more.” The system works in tandem with other moderation systems that include text-based filtering across 14 languages for in-game text (for both chat and usernames) as well as the in-game player reporting system.

Then, in January of 2024 they revealed that over two million accounts have been punished since the inclusion of ToxMod, meaning that the system is working as intended. But how many of these bans were wrongly delivered? Other players have pointed out that they “swear like a sailor” while playing and never faced any consequences, while people they’ve played with are banned constantly for racist and sexist slurs.

So what can you do to avoid being banned? Apart from not using slurs and harassing other people, you could try using voice chat software like Discord to speak with your friends privately. Or you can always opt out of voice chat completely.