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NGL, when I first saw Warner making a public fuss over this, I had a bit of a reaction. Like, no one comes after my boy steam, I like my games and I like my platform. And maybe it’s because I don’t engage in many public multiplayer games these days, but I just haven’t really come across this extremist content frequently enough to feel Congress needs to get involved.
But…
I can see from the comments, my anecdotal experiences aren’t the whole picture. And I do get that sometimes in an otherwise free market, regulation is necessary to prevent a situation where a company does the right thing and then suffers financially from the backlash/boycott that ensues. Better to let the government be the ones to take the heat by those that get upset by the moderation.
But I also kind of agree with the sentiment, Congress needs to clean up its own hate speech and ethics, before further legislating what everyone else should be doing.
ADL report
Opinion discarded. Those ADL fucks lie about damn near everything.
You guys can’t even keep nazis out of government. Why should it be steams responsibility to keep them from playing a game?
That’s the whole point. Sure there’s Nazis in the government but look over there, a Nazi! Look over there a Nazi! It’s Nazis from top to bottom. Wanna let us censor the Internet to stop them? No? You’re a Nazi sympathiser then.
Well it’s a nazi country founded by literal slave masters. What do people expect?
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Translation: Our corpo overlords don’t like that you can review bomb our shitty games and force us to take losses when we do shitty corpo things. Appease my bosses or they’ll make me be bottom again with no lube.
Where? Where at tho? I’ve been using steam and playing valve games for like 16 years or something like that and I don’t see it anywhere. Maybe the one troll in user made guides but that usually goes away just like any other platform
you can go through the community hubs/reviews of basically any WW2/military shooter or strategy game and see multiple people with Hitler avatars, swastikas, black suns, anything you can think of. it’s extremely prevalent.
hell, just going through the HOI4 community hub and in the first 30 seconds of scrolling I’ve come across at least 3 nazi posts. the forums are completely unmoderated, going through the discussions and I’ve already found multiple instances of straight up holocaust denial/glorification. it’s absolutely rampant.
Honestly its not just any WW2 game, but any remotely popular game’s updates pages, when steam points & awards got added, several people set up bots to spam every update post on large games to say “Add pronouns and rainbow flags” banking on the conservatives giving them the jester award, others have it set up to spam “Dont give into woke and add (whatever buzzword is currently popular)” so they can get other awards, and like the morons they are, conservatives keep falling for both, giving awards and reacting in the comments.
LGBTQ+ people and allies have mostly stopped opening the comments on updates due to this, so there are multiple instances of people just openly calling for the extermination of anyone LGBTQ+ that never get reported or removed on the updates pages of otherwise not rightwing games.
Forums are supposed to be moderated by the company that makes the game, this means that if someone makes a nazi post and the company has no moderators, or has moderators that are also nazis, reporting it does nothing, even if it’s blatantly against Steam’s TOS.
Something seriously needs to be done about it.
Once again, a clueless boomer blames games.
How about YouTube? Why aren’t we going after Google?
What about Twitter? Musk’s platform is filled with extremist hate.
Plenty of extremist diarrhea spewing from the mouth of a President Elect.
It’s almost like this kind of content on Steam is a symptom of a bigger problem.
Steam honestly has it really bad. You don’t see blatant hate speech in play store reviews but you certainly do on steam. The same goes for their forums, which are almost totally unmoderated. Totally agree tho that this is a symptom of a larger problem and am always wary of the government seeking to impede free speech, even if it’s speech I despise. If there are calls to violence and stuff I’m totally cool with that being prosecuted ofc.
Yes, agreed, it definitely needs moderation. But I don’t think it needs singling out (again, not saying don’t moderate).
The bigger picture is a proliferation of online extremist speech in general. And yes, Google may have done well to moderate play store reviews (anecdotally), but they certainly haven’t done well with YouTube.
But I would suggest that focusing on any one online forum / store / outlet / etc. will naturally miss an important trend, and the reasons for that trend should be understood – while concurrently doing everything possible to limit this kind of hate online.
Absolutely those platforms are a bigger problem, but your argument isn’t a very good one. Yes, we should go after those platforms. Yes, we should also go after Steam. Whataboutism never solved any problems.
I think you missed the first sentence of my comment. Games have been blamed above other media for years and years and years. That is not whataboutism.
Edit: or the last sentence for that matter.
It’s almost like this kind of content on Steam is a symptom of a bigger problem.
I never suggested that Steam doesn’t need improvement. There is extremist content being posted. But it is definitely part of a larger (frankly, much more obvious) problem. Calling attention to a root cause is just not whataboutism.
From another article talking about this:
For years, Sen. Warner, a former tech entrepreneur, has been raising the alarm about rise of hate-fueled content proliferating online, as well as the threat posed by domestic and foreign bad actors circulating disinformation. Recently, he pressed directly for action from Discord, another video game-based social networking site that is hosting violent predatory groups that coerce minors into self-harm and suicide. He has also called attention to the rise of pro-eating disorder content on AI platforms. A leader in the tech space, Sen. Warner has also lead the charge for broad Section 230 reform to allow social media companies to be held accountable for enabling cyber-stalking, harassment, and discrimination on their platforms.
The linked Section 230 Reform details
He’s targeting all kinds of social media, not just gaming platforms.
Then, good. I just hope they’re being tackled by order of affected users.
You literally said “what about” in your comment. You specifically argued that the problem lay elsewhere, and Steam is just a symptom. Attempting to absolve Steam of culpability in the problem because “games get blamed above other media” is absolutely whataboutism. It’s a bad argument.
You literally said “what about” in your comment.
Do you legitimately think that any use of the words “what about” makes something whataboutism?
You specifically argued that the problem lay elsewhere
Again, you seem to have missed the point of the comment. I did not deny that Steam needs improvement. Things can be symptoms of larger problems, and calling that out is not whataboutism (to the contrary, the purpose of whataboutism is to suggest that there is no problem with item X – not that item X is a symptom of item Y).
Edit: clarity
Do you legitimately think that any use of the words “what about” makes something whataboutism?
No, that’s not what makes it whataboutism. That’s just a funny bit of your comment. What makes it whataboutism is your continued insistence that the problematic behavior is sourced from elsewhere. That’s not how things work. The right-wing extremism on Steam isn’t a symptom of extremism elsewhere. It isn’t sourced from elsewhere. It’s there on Steam, because the source for it is the same on Steam as it is on Twitter, right-wing extremist users. Suggesting that it is derived from the other sites implies that Valve is less responsible for it than other sites, which doesn’t make any sense. Furthermore, your argument in your comment is based on your perception of victimhood of video games by other media, which isn’t relevant to the conversation at all.
And finally, the fact that Steam supposedly has, by your estimation and without any supporting evidence, less right-wing extremism than other sites doesn’t make the problem better or worse for Valve. It’s still a problem, and it’s one they have to deal with. Not twitter, not Facebook, and not anyone else.
your continued insistence that the problematic behavior is sourced from elsewhere
So you’re suggesting that Steam is the source of the extremist behavior we see across a broad spectrum of other media?
For someone literally arguing about argumentation, it sure is hard to see your point.
No, you just don’t seem to be understanding what I’m saying, or the point of the article linked. The source is the users, of course. What I’m saying is that they didn’t come from twitter. They’ve always been on Steam, just as they’ve always been on twitter or facebook.
And so, it logically follows that if you blame twitter for not dealing with users like that, then you must, by necessity, blame Valve for not dealing with them either.
Yes, people say mean things on the internet. That’s never going away. Teach your children how to deal with it.
I don’t think that Nazi shit or promotion of terrorism falls under “mean things on the internet” that would be over-trivializing, and I do say that because I have indeed seen many people doing these things in my years on Steam, as well as encouraging violence towards me for being a girl and having “used to have been a boy” (being transgender).
are they “mean things” and are they on the internet? If so it’s mean things on the internet, this doesn’t mean it won’t cause IRL damage, but until it transitions from hateful words to actionable threats it’s just an occupational hazard of the internet.
People need to understand that the internet is a public space. Family PCs should be in a shared space like the living room and kids need to have parental controls enabled on their smart phone. Beyond that, yeah people need to get thicker skins when it comes to social media (including steam in this).
Strong disagree on parental controls. As a parent, if I don’t trust my kids, they won’t get a device. Period. If I trust them, they will get a device without any limitations. Period.
I really don’t see the point in parental controls, all it does is encourage kids to learn how to get around parental controls. Instead of that, teach kids what it takes to earn your trust and go that route.
I’m a parent, and here are my only controls:
- Switch - passcode because my 4yo kept playing games when not allowed; I told the older kids the code, and will probably remove it soon
- my computers passwords - when my kids are allowed to play games or whatever, I’ll unlock it and tell them what they can and can’t use it for, with zero controls other than the underlying threat of losing privileges entirely if they misuse it
- tablet - each has a passcode, but the kids don’t use them much (only on trips)
- TV - again, 4yo kept watching when not allowed, and the older kids watched as well (but only when the 4yo did it), so they all lost access; will probably remove this soon
We do no internet filters, no enforced time limits (they have their own timers though), and no locks on specific programs. Either I trust them with everything or nothing. They know what they’re allowed to use, and they know the consequences.
I owe my IT career to my parents trying to restrict my access with parental controls. I learned a lot figuring out how to circumvent those things and cover my tracks.
I’m not convinced by your approach but I respect that you’ve put a lot of thought into it. I guess my main issue is that it seems some parents don’t think about it at all.
Oh boy, good luck with that outlook in today’s age. You can trust them to get into shit, I believe helicopter parenting has become prevalent because we’ve lost the “village” it takes to raise a kid. You used to be able to trust a parent to step in if they were over at someone else’s house and a discussion got nasty or a fight broke out. You would have neighbors who looked after the kids and would let you know if they were up to some shit. Now the kids talk on discord and other apps, completely unsupervised or at times even inaccessible (after the fact) if they’ve set it up right. You’ve got algorithm’s trained on millions of users to suck your kids in, never ending entertainment with minimal effort.
As a parent, who is completely conscious of everything going on around social media and technology, you will absolutely need to step in. Most adults can’t even handle it, you WILL have to be the parent who sets boundaries on the stimuli their brain craves but has a negative impact on their overall health. You don’t instill healthy eating into a child by giving them unlimited money and telling them to make their own decisions. You work with them, share your experience, let them cook sometimes but monitor over and see the results of their activity. Are they making healthy choices or ordering door dash?
Make it more difficult for them by setting restrictions they have to learn to bypass, even if it feels ridiculous it’s a whole different setup for effort-reward. It will interest them into getting into deeper components of technology and how everything works. It’s absolutely what kids are suppose to do, just like we always figure out a way to get away with shit which ultimately improves various skills.
Just set up redirects on DNS levels for the fedi alternatives. E.g. Reddit->selfhosted Lemmy, Musk’s trumpet called X->selfhosted Mastodon instance, Instagram->Pixelfed and TikTok->Loops. I mainly use Instagram, because we have a class group on it.
Sticks and stones,. something something something…
On Jan. 3rd, this will switch to a Republican senator saying the same thing, but the “extremist content” will be “woke.”
I know the article addresses it but… What about X’ter? Head of Twatter now has an official government position while his shitty company allows Neo Nazi, hate, homophobic, and misogynist behavior runs rampant!
What a fucking farce…
Every accusation is a confession with fascists
Wow this push against Valve kind of popped up quickly and suddenly didn’t it?
Honestly it’s about fucking time. The unmoderated hate speech on their platform has gone on long enough. Many people don’t realize just how bad it is but I recently hopped on some servers and I got called “tranny” and “groomer” because people knew me and they knew I “used to be a boy” (not true, I never was a boy, just in-denial). I’ve also seen people pushing Nazi shit on Steam community discussions and in-game on official servers, it’s insanely bad.
You know were the ones wholl get censored and not the nazis though
Yeah let’s suggest these kids spending their time somewhere way safer like Matt Gaetz’s mansion.
Churches and other pedophile centers
DC is both.
Afaik, the discussion boards for individual games are not moderated by Valve staff (outside of their own titles and the general discussions not tied to any specific game), but by the developer of the game. And it pretty much is ignored by everyone outside of a few indie devs that either just believe in transparency and use the boards themselves, or because they have huge egos and act like little tyrants being the worst kind of Reddit/Discord mod. The only in-between is the automated systems that work off reports and filters.
Bingo.
It’s been that way since its inception, astronauts with gun meme or whatever.
Well, not really. There was a time when it was Valve staff and volunteer moderators under their direction. But that was before their discussion forums got integrated into Steam directly and there was a bajillion games on it.
Though I am confident they could actually hire people to handle it if they wanted to. Or were forced to. Steam makes a bit of profit, I’m sure.
You know, I think you are right.
I meant to say when the discussion forums were integrated and basically autogenerated for any game, when Steam went from ‘this is our game launcher’ to ‘soon we will sell every pc game that has ever and will ever exist.’
But when it comes to hiring people to moderate things?
Insanity.
Facebook does this by hiring tens, hundreds of thousands of moderators in economically undeveloped nations, managed by a few thousand based in the US or EU.
Its a horror show sweatshop of constant exposure to the most horrible content imaginable, which basically drives many employees to suicide or insanity.
There is no AI that can do this.
… Valve could maybe? probably? afford to hire hundreds of thousands of low cost moderators following Facebook’s model.
But I’m pretty sure that they would basically go, oh, we are now legally responsible for what is said on our platform?
Fuck it, nuke 99% of it from orbit, do a bit of redesign, hire a much smaller cadre of moderators, who will manage a vastly stripped down and more cumbersome and more restrictive ability to comment on or discuss things.
… What would be the downside to that?
12 year olds and morons with no impulse control now use discord instead of the steam forums?
People maybe go back to making their own game based community websites/forums?
… Who is going to stop using Steam because the discussion forums dissapear?
Because all the default comment posting and viewing settings for all the other ways you can leave a public message now flip to being restrictive and time delayed?
I really do stand by my other statement in this thread: You could erase everything that is not from a human, manually pinned discussion thread and nothing of value would be lost.
Kinda stretching it aren’t they?
Palistine? Really?
They even admit that pepe can be used in perfectly normal ways, yet they show it’s the number one most used one. That’s crazy to me lmao
Pepe is a beloved internet meme, not a symbol of hate. Rightoid asshats need to leave pepe and doge the fuck alone. >:(
I thought it came from 4chan, but it actually comes from Myspace. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog
Wtf pepe is considered alt-right because alt-right uses them sometimes??? I hear they also use English! Maybe English needs to get banned!
They didn’t just use it sometimes, they were using it as an intentional dog whistle, that is the difference. Part of dog whistling is choosing something that, otherwise, has had no real relationship to the thing it is being used as a dog whistle for.
so they can choose anything and we just have to stop using it because its their dogwhistle now?
No, but you have to understand that it now comes with the context of being a WP dog whistle. The symbolism of the Nazis weren’t anything to their ideology before hand. They had widespread use for thousands of years. Now they, especially the primary one, is all but verboten in the west, and people who use things, like the swastika, as religious symbols, even know to tread with caution using it in the west. White hoods, and robes, have been used in cultural/religious regalia forever. However, you don’t use them in the US unless you consider being mistaken for a klan memeber.
Can we reclaim pepe? Probably, it was minor compared to the aforementioned things, and the creator has done a lot to kibosh the commercial use of it from right wing people. However, it was that, and that context doesn’t just disappear because you don’t like it.
There’s a whole documentary about reclaiming pepe called “feels good man”
The more we discourage people from using pepe because WP and shitheads, the more they win.
what if they start using this as weapon to deny us things?
to me it’s kind of kind the nazi bar thing. if you’re at a bar with 2 Nazis, and you’re not a nazi, you’re still hanging out at a nazi bar.
they fucking adore this frog. no other group has embraced it as strongly or consistently. I’m quite happy to let an old ass meme die because i find it distasteful now that it’s the favorite meme of nazis.
Same shit happened to the swastika. It comes from Hinduism, still widely used there, in the West it also used to be a symbol of good luck before the 30’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
Korrekt!
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Wasn’t it co-opted by racists around 2016 or something? They also took the “OK” finger gesture from the circle game, the fuckers.
They did, but I don’t think they still have them.
Pepe is now (or again) a beloved element of Twitch chat, and the OK symbol… I dunno, that was eight years ago. I just don’t hear anybody talking about it, unless it’s to half remember that it’s bad now or something.
The whole OK symbol thing was literally a false flag by 4chan to clown on the news media’s fervor at the time to label things as racist dog whistles, specifically the whole Pepe shit that was going on.
The fucking thread that started it was (paraphrasing): “Hey guys, do you think the news media would be stupid enough to believe the OK hand sign is a white power dog whistle? [Image of WP poorly traced over the OK hand symbol]”
Obviously, if you get your kicks out of pretending to be a fool, you shouldn’t be surprised when you find yourself in the presence of actual fools. That also very much applies to the type of edgelords on 4chan that thought it would be funny to “pretend to be” racists, or at least to have discovered a racist hate symbol. Eventually enough people will take it seriously that the original “joke” (if you can even call it that) will be lost.
Why do mods hate Hindus???
Wait, is just using a Valknut considered a hate symbol? I was under the impression that it was a pretty common “I like Vikings/Odin/Paganism” type symbol… Same with Tyr tbh.
The issue is that the Venn diagram of people interested in vikings/odinism and racists bigots is almost just a circle
Not sure I believe that for a minute. There’s definitely a group there, nobody can deny that, but Norse mythology is incredibly popular among leftists too - I say this as somewhat of a Norse mythology leftist, whose favorite viking/odinist/pagan band preaches unity and kindness among all people and is fronted by a polyamorous bisexual - there’s a lot to love in the mythos and the factual history, and it appeals to a wide variety of people for a wide variety of reasons.
What band is that? I’m always interested in checking out new music.
This is hyperbole. A large amount of racists and bigots are into norse stuff? Maybe. Almost all people in the norse stuff are racists and bigots? High doubt, and shouldn’t be allowed to be coopted anyway. Loki is one of the few ancient figures with some gender fluid markings as it is.
You’re right, but 100% of the people I’ve encountered that were REALLY into Norse stuff specifically, rather than a general interest in history, were white supremacist.
That’s a really small sample size and small point of view, isn’t it?
Most anecdotes are.
I’m interested in Norse mythology for stories like the time Thor had to wear a dress to get back his hammer. I bet he looked hot in that dress.
This is fair. I am usually not in spaces where I’d see it much but have heard tell. Part of why I say it is to not have people feel shamed if they just generally like the culture/pop aesthetic involved without any baggage and to encourage people to do what they can to counter co-opt attempts
How is the PFLP a hate symbol LMAO
Moon Man? Like the old McDonald’s commercial? How the fuck is that a hateful or extremist symbol? Because anyone who remembers it must be extreme for burgers?
He got reused in the mid 2010s as a very racist meme where people would make him sing some truly heinous shit, actually
Defunctland (I think) did a video on Mac Tonight that mentions it in passing, if you’re curious open a private browsing window and look it up, you can likely find the memes still
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Til that the gate of the Auschwitz extermination camp is an extremist or hateful symbol.
I’m sorry that you had to find out this way.
