A typical scene from Dr. Phil’s show
Dr. Phil is a good friend of mine. He’s full of nonsensical hillbilly analogies and great advice on how not to beat my wife. But for Terry, a gamer on Microsoft’s Xbox Live service, Dr. Phil has “valuable” advice on dealing with racist cyber-bullies.
Terry explains, that as a black gamer on Xbox Live, he endures heaps of racist verbal abuse, and on Tuesday’s show, Dr. Phil filled Terry with joyous psychobabble and helped heal his wounded gamer heart.
Terry admits to being a loyal 360 owner, but questions how long he can go on now that his headset is full of racism. He claims to have been called “monkey” on several occasions and was even told he was going to be lynched.
As a father of three, Terry fears for the safety of his family. He no longer allows his children to play online for fear they will also be harassed or threatened.
So what’s a guy to do? Well, he submits several complaints about the offenders, as well as calls customer support to report them. I wonder if “I’m being verbally threatened” is a phrase Xbox cool dude Max understands.
Apparently, Microsoft didn’t do anything, or at least not enough to satisfy Terry. The next logical step, obviously, is to call up Dr. Phil. I don’t mean to make light of his troubles, as I surely do not condone this type of behavior, but seriously, anyone who has played on Xbox Live has probably heard the n-word multiple times.
While it certainly is offensive, I don’t think anyone out there is actively hunting people through Xbox Live in order to find out where they live and attack them. Most people who use racial slurs on Live are idiot kids who think it’s cool because, well — they’re idiot kids. Going on Dr. Phil’s show just gives Terry’s favorite pastime an even worse reputation than it deserves.
Xbox Live has a system in place to block, report, and avoid users. While I don’t expect that Terry could prevent these things from ever happening again, at least he can get rid of a few bad seeds. In my experience, the system actually works quite well.
Of course I think Microsoft should do something about this, but the guests on Dr. Phil’s show think it crosses a more severe line. Larry Walters, a First Amendment attorney, believes that these online verbal threats are a federal crime and should be investigated by the FBI.
If somebody online is making threats to engage in some sort of violence toward this person or part of his family, that is absolutely a federal crime. The FBI should be all over it, and I’m surprised that they’re not.
If the FBI actually made cases out of all the morons on Xbox Live, or the Internet for that matter, they would be doing so at the detriment of more important issues. Isn’t the FBI doing a horrible enough job already?
Dr. Phil says he contacted Microsoft, who is now willing to make a case for Terry.
We explained to them that you have filed multiple complaints. You have the numbers; you have the tagline of the people who are doing this sort of thing, so Microsoft has said they are going to set up with [you] one of their security team members, and they are going to discuss this investigation regarding your complaints and try to get the ball rolling. So we have gotten them, at least, to assign an investigator specific to you, so they can sit down and start this ball rolling.
Great job, Dr. Phil. You got Microsoft’s security team to say they will think about doing their jobs. I’m sure Terry is very pleased to hear that.
You can go read the transcript from the show at Dr. Phil’s website, or just travel back in time and watch the show yourself.
