Real-time toxicity detection in online environments poses a significant challenge, due to the increasing prevalence of social media and gaming platforms. We introduce ToxBuster, a simple and scalable model that reliably detects toxic content in real-time for a line of chat by including chat history and metadata. ToxBuster consistently outperforms conventional toxicity models across popular multiplayer games, including Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor, and DOTA 2. We conduct an ablation study to assess the importance of each model component and explore ToxBuster’s transferability across the datasets. Furthermore, we showcase ToxBuster’s efficacy in post-game moderation, successfully flagging 82.1% of chat-reported players at a precision level of 90.0%. Additionally, we show how an additional 6% of unreported toxic players can be proactively moderated.

Identity biases arise commonly from annotated datasets, can be propagated in language models and can cause further harm to marginal groups. Existing bias benchmarking datasets are mainly focused on gender or racial biases and are made to pinpoint which class the model is biased towards. They also are not designed for the gaming industry, a concern for models built for toxicity detection in videogames’ chat. We propose a dataset and a method to highlight oversensitive terms using reactivity analysis and the model’s performance. We test our dataset against ToxBuster, a language model developed by Ubisoft fine-tuned for toxicity detection on multiplayer videogame’s written chat, and Perspective API. We find that these toxicity models often automatically tag terms related to a community’s identity as toxic, which prevents members of already marginalized groups to make their presence known or have a mature / normal conversation. Through this process, we have generated an interesting list of terms that trigger the models to varying degrees, along with insights on establishing a baseline through human annotations.