If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Marvel Rivals has decided your speech needs a chaperone. In Season 3.5, under the cheery banner of Operation: Shield the Players, the game is flipping the switch on full-time surveillance of voice chat. Not “record if someone complains.” Not “clip the highlights.” We’re talking a 24/7 algorithm lurking in every match, combing through every word you say, waiting for something it doesn’t like. Until now, if a teammate called you something unprintable over voice chat, you could file a report. It wasn’t elegant, but it left the choice in your hands. That’s no longer good enough. More: Trash Talk Once Went Hand-in-Hand With Gaming. But Big Tech Is Killing It. Marvel Rivals will now listen to everything, always. If the system hears “toxic behavior” as defined by code written by people you’ve never met, it flags it for a human reviewer. The reviewer then decides whether your account should be frozen, suspended, or nuked outright. Game Director Guangguang is upbeat about the change: “United we stand, divided we fall. I truly believe that, if we work together, we will all have a great time in Marvel Rivals.” https://video.reclaimthenet.org/articles/marvel-rivals-censor-surveillance-9900090.mp4 You may detect a certain mismatch between that Hallmark-card optimism and the reality of an AI eavesdropper logging your match chatter. The pitch is this: make cooperation more rewarding by making bad behavior impossible. The execution is less heartwarming. Every scrap of banter, every sarcastic aside, every joke about your friend’s clumsy aim is piped through an automated system with the discretion of a malfunctioning airport metal detector. Concerned about storage, interpretation, or who exactly is on the other end of that review process? You’re not alone. Nobody’s quite sure how accurate the algorithm will be, how long your audio will sit in some server farm, or how often a harmless remark will be “interpreted” into a violation. There’s a reason people don’t hold job interviews in voice chat. It’s messy, spontaneous, and often ridiculous. But that’s the fun. When every conversation is essentially a monitored broadcast, spontaneity tends to evaporate. Teammates who once swapped running jokes mid-match might think twice before saying anything off-script. The official line is about keeping the community “safe.” The subtext is about keeping everyone under constant watch. And while Marvel Rivals isn’t the first game to do it, it’s one of the few leaning into it as a public selling point. In a competitive game, the line between “keeping things civil” and “treating every player like a suspect” gets awfully thin. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Marvel Rivals Introduces Always‑On AI Voice Chat Monitoring Under “Operation: Shield the Players” appeared first on Reclaim The Net.