B.C. startup Two Hat Security Ltd. is falling under the umbrella of Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT).
The American giant revealed Friday it has acquired the Kelowna company, best known for developing technology to clamp down on online abuse. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Two Hat works primarily with gaming companies to deploy tools that weed out inappropriate language or abusive content, such as pornographic images, on their respective social networks.
The company, founded in 2012, had previously partnered with Microsoft and its Xbox gaming console to clamp down on online abuse.
“For any online community to thrive, content moderation is a critical investment to ensure positive user experiences and maintain engagement over time," Microsoft vice-president of Xbox product services Dave McCarthy said in a blog post.
“I’ve witnessed the impact they’ve had within Xbox and we are thrilled that this acquisition will further accelerate our first-party content moderation solutions across gaming.”
Prior to the pandemic, Two Hat was processing about 1 billion interactions each day, including the exchange of chat messages and photos.
That figure more than tripled to about 100 billion interactions each month, CEO Steve Parkis told BIV last year, shortly after assuming the top job at the Kelowna-based company.
Parkis and founder Chris Priebe said in a joint statement issued Friday that over the past decade those interactions have now grown to more a trillion annually.
The company offers its services in more than 20 languages, meaning it needs to rely on both human expertise and artificial intelligence to identify emerging slang and lingo from a range of demographics.
“When Megan Thee Stallion says the word ‘WAP’ for the first time, you know we're immediately on that,” Parkis said, referring to the prolific summer 2020 anthem from Cardi B and featuring Megan Thee Stallion.
“We're not just doing dictionaries, we understand cultural nuances.”
Companies are finding that if they don’t address spikes in abusive behaviour online, they risk losing users.
A 2016 Data & Society Research Institute study, Online Harassment, Digital Abuse and Cyberstalking in America, found 21% of respondents stopped using social media after facing online harassment.
“For all of these companies, audience is by far and away their most important asset,” Parkis said.
