Habbo Hotel to launch 'The Great Unmute' after porn scandal
Published Jun 15 2012, 17:20 BST | By Andrew Laughlin
The company lost three of its major advertisers and two investors this week after Channel 4 News exposed "serious lapses of moderation" on the Finnish website, which is claimed to be "the world's largest social game and online community for teenagers" with 10m unique visitors.
Sulake will now reopen the chat with a mission to reshape Habbo Hotel with help from the people who legitimately use the service.
The company has certainly been chastened by the Channel 4 News Investigation, but it also hit out at some less scrupulous journalists who have been offering Habbo Hotel users "cash for case studies".
Habbo Hotel players create avatars and enter the virtual hotel, where they can chat to others, in public or private, and buy goods to furnish their own 'room'.
But a journalist for Channel 4 spent two months playing the game, under the guise of an 11-year-old girl, and was frequently exposed to chat of a "sexual, perverse, violent, pornographic" nature. She was also urged to leave the site and talk privately on other services, such as MSN and Skype.
The scandal prompted Sulake to impose a "mute" on all chat on the site, resulting in users in avatar form staging a "candle-lit vigil" to show their support.
Sulake's chief executive Paul LaFontaine has now said that the company will restart chat as part of what he is calling "The Great Unmute", offering users the chance to feedback on the state of the network.
"We believe that a comprehensive safety programme can only be delivered by close collaboration with users and parents together," he wrote in a blog post today.
"As soon as we saw the Channel 4 News report on Tuesday evening, we took the decision to mute all conversations across the site.
"This has had a massive business impact, but the safety of our users is non-negotiable. We must maintain our focus on the quality of interaction within the Habbo community, and not the quantity of visits we receive."
He added: "Since conversations on the site were muted, we have experienced an unprecedented online response with thousands of loyal users remaining active on the site, holding a silent candle-lit vigil to express their support for Habbo.
"During this time, senior management and world leading technologists are working tirelessly in our Helsinki headquarters to ensure that we deliver the best possible protection to the millions of teenagers and young people who regularly visit our site."
LaFontaine said that the company wants to work with users to "define and deliver a fully protected environment as well as a creative user experience".
He said that the "Great Unmute" will give users the chance to create "a conversational tidal wave" telling Sulake what they want, while also "showing the world that our global community contains millions of responsible and proud users who have a positive experience on our site".
More details on that will follow in "the coming days", he added.
LaFontaine thanked Channel 4 News for "initiating a global debate" on the "incredibly serious issue" of pornographic and overtly sexual chat on social networks.
He said that it has provided a "global wake-up call" both for his company and the "poorly regulated industry" of social and community gaming.
However, he claimed that some journalists have been contacting Habbo users with offers of cash in exchange for them sharing stories of "inappropriate interactions they may have encountered on the site".
"If there are individuals who have been affected by inappropriate conversations, they may well be vulnerable and certainly will not benefit from self-interested approaches and offers of cash for case studies," LaFontaine noted.
"We want to create a comprehensive and constructive response to our current challenges and send out a call to action for improved safety standards across the online gaming community. Petty attempts to generate more bad news are distracting us from the job at hand."
Julie Maykels, I find it completely ironic that people can criticise Habbo yet allow their children on two social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. I've been an avid Habbo player since 2004, and like someone else has mentioned, I've maybe come across twice in that eight-year history of someone asking for my Skype or MSN. Let's stop blaming the moderation all the time, and let's get parents taking some charge over this. First of all, anyone under-13 should not be accessing the site. I have no sympathy for parents who cannot do their jobs properly and implement filters or blocks to inhibit their child from gaining access to a website that is designed for teenagers.
The site is safe when it comes to sexual content being posted, and how people can say they find Facebook and Twitter more safe is completely delusional and frankly laughable. Those websites allow users to upload any old images and for them to be seen instantly by anyone who clicks on them. Furthermore, people readily post dodgy links, of which, are not filtered or even checked by the moderation. Habbo, on the other hand, provides users with warning messages telling them they are able to click off-site, and moreover, you CANNOT upload ANY images on Habbo Hotel at all.
June 17th 2012 at 5:32pm(+1 like)
I've been on habbo for about 3 years. Only once or twice in the whole time have I encountered any people requesting skype or anything else like that. I reported them, and they were banned. I was part of the candle-lit vigil or whatever it was, and I will always be loyal to habbo. it's incredibly safe and I'm really annoyed. I mean. someone went on there prtending to be eleven? Im sorry but isnt that what "Pedo's" do? I mean, There are NO "Pedo's" really when you look at the amount of decent Habbo's. Channel 4 are a bunch of liars. Habbo is safe, and I rest my case.
June 16th 2012 at 8:22pm
Habbo Hotel is the one site I refused to let my children join as I had heard a lot of complaints about the content and that was a few years ago. They are allowed on facebook and twitter but do so in my company in the same room, so every now and then I can take a peek at what they are doing over their shoulder, they are usually so into it they don't even notice I am behind them. I try not to preach to them but they do know the dangers and know they can come to me if anything untoward happens.
June 16th 2012 at 7:35pm
The online games on Facebook (MiniPlanet etc) are exactly like that.
June 16th 2012 at 2:04pm
When I played habbo hotel it wasn't like this? I used to make popular rooms, and trade furni etc. Not everyone goes on there to have "cyber" etc. I was 11 when I started playing in 2002! Ah I loved it! I played it for almost 10 years.
June 16th 2012 at 1:21pm