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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?
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.
I was going to add, as a user of both Steam and YouTube, I have seen far worse stuff in YouTube comments than I ever have on a Steam forum.
I think part of this comes down to the fact that disgusting, hateful comments will pop up on almost any YouTube video in the comment section, but you actually have to navigate to Steam forums with this content.
So, YouTube comments are thrown in your face and hard to not see, as they are right below the video, but Steam forum comments are at least hidden behind a few layers of clicks.
I agree that singling out Steam as if it’s the main problem, isn’t going to fix anything, at all.
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.
Kinda stretching it aren’t they?
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!
Yeah, I’m very much in the camp of “fuck you, you don’t get to have it” when it comes to extremist groups trying to co-opt other symbols.
It’s extremely doable–the LGBT population has largely succeeded at doing exactly that with “queer”, for example–these days, basically nobody utters that word as a pejorative. Fuck you, it’s ours now. See what I mean?
There are way more of us than them, we could literally do this for everything these dipshits try to ‘claim’.
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.
Can we reclaim pepe?
We never lost it, imo. The vast majority of Pepe use is by people communicating nothing resembling a message of hate in any way.
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.
Except in this instance the bar is the meme and you can’t stop the Nazis from using it no matter what you do. Even if you move on to some other meme they can just as easily follow you, now no one knows what’s acceptable or not and for how long.
Korrekt!
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
The counter-clockwise one would have been the more fitting nazi symbol for Night and the Goddess of Death. Had to think about “Are we the baddies”
deleted by creator
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.
I don’t know if it was really a false flag. Nazis did start using the OK symbol for a time, and I think that was the point. It was built to be smoke and mirrors.
I do believe a lot of channers thought that it was just a joke. I mean, that ambiguity is what makes the dog whistle what it is.
But yeah, it’s a pretty lame magic show when all your tricks are, like, doing a Charlottesville but saying you’re not.
It was a joke, and still is. It’s just that there were enough extremist imbeciles out there who didn’t realize it was a joke, and took it seriously.
That doesn’t change anything about its origin as a joke.
Google says Steam has 132 million monthly active users. Even if you count Pepe (which is absurd, the vast majority of use of it has nothing to do with anything hateful), that’s still far under 1% of users.
But that number would belittle the fake outrage and the side payments would stop.
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
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.
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
In my experience, people are, on average, extremely susceptible to this very basic logical fallacy, and truly believe the two sentiments above are equivalent. In other words, believing that “most X are Y” implies “most Y are X”.
It’s fucking everywhere, pervasive all over the political spectrum too, it’s universal. Radical feminists use the fact that most physical assailants are male to malign half of the human population. Racists use statistics about what percentage of violent crime is committed by a race, to draw conclusions about what percentage of that race commits violent crime. Hell, Reefer Madness, a propaganda piece with a well-deserved reputation of being completely full of shit, rests its premise on the exact same fallacy: “practically everyone dying from hard drug use is/was also a weed smoker, so we’ve concluded weed use leads to hard drug use”.
I see it over, and over, and over again, online and in real life. It makes you want to grab someone by the shoulders and shake them while yelling “all oranges are fruits, does that mean all fruits are oranges?!”, lol.
That’s enough venting for tonight, though, haha.
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
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.
I enjoyed the Vikings tv series, particularly the early seasons with Ragnar. I especially liked when they wove in religion and mysticism into the episodes. A lot of people enjoyed the series at the time, it was objectively popular. Having an interest in something well represented in popular culture does not make you a de facto racist bigot.
There’s a more likely argument to make, that within the population of white nationalist racist bigots, there’s an overrepresentation of interest/obsession with Vikings/Odinism.
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
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
Palistine? Really?
Why do mods hate Hindus???
Removed by mod
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.
ADL report
Opinion discarded. Those ADL fucks lie about damn near everything.
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.
Oh damn okay. I just didn’t see it because I don’t play those games
Short version is that for the most part forum moderation for each game is left up to the devs or whoever they appoint, and users can create user groups and curators without much if any restrictions and they don’t particularly give a shit what content the game you want to sell has. The only real exceptions are if it’s illegal in the US, which applies to very little (for example no CSAM).
I find it interesting that the federal government threatening a private entity with legal repercussions if it doesn’t restrict the speech of it’s users isn’t such an obvious violation of the first amendment that lawyers aren’t climbing over each other to fight this one.
And if you don’t see the problem with it, imagine we agree that the federal government should be allowed to restrict what expression can go on on internet platforms content-wise, then imagine Trump and his cronies deciding where the borders lie. They already want to revive the Comstock Act.
Welcome to Commiefornia
The Comstock Act was created by a right wing Christian puritan, and has been fought against by leftists, and supported by conservatives, throughout it’s history. But commies are to blame, sure.
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.
Oh fuck off. The US is an unsafe place, not Steam.
Both
Edit: I didn’t know this community is so reactive, someone replied how is it controversial? Simply glancing through the article, anyone would know it’s talking about the comments and forums pasting swastikas and other extremist shit. This isn’t normal in other social media.
Explain Steam being unsafe? It’s a marketplace. Developers make controversial content.
Have you seen any steam forum pages?
Then just ban any forum. Heck, ban Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Lemmy, Reddit… because if Steam Forum is bad then every site that allow every people on internet to comment is also bad.
We can become like South Korea if you want a perfectly safe internet.
Sucking and licking it clean, calm down bruh
Hitler My Friend is a 99 cent game on Steam with an 8/10 positive rating.
A 3D shooter that will change your ideas about alternative history! In this game you will climb into the boots of the unforeseen Adolf Hitler.
There’s more, but I’m not sifting through more dog shit. This is a good thing.
Oh, it’s a threat from the left. I was more worried about one from the right.
What the left says can be completely ignored right now.
What do you mean “the left”? It is from the US so at best it is from the “slight less extreme far right”.
The relative left.
GabeN: There is nothing you can say to stop me from selling Furry Hitler
As a long time Steam user, while I still really like Steam and think it’s the more consumer friendly platform, it has devolved greatly. Especially discussion forums are nearly no different than reddit toxicity where people exhibit their worst behaviors. I miss the legitimate discussions and love for specific games. Now it’s mostly complaining and complete disregard for developers being humans.
The flood of garbage games has also been fairly obvious over the last decade. Some filters on your account handle a lot of this at least for the adult ones, but not all of it. It reminds me of the Wii shovelware era, but far worse.
BUT I would remind the Senator they STILL don’t even have a fucking budget passed for this fiscal year we are already a month and a half into and they oughta stay in their lane and do their first basic god damn job before pointing at the supposed failures of others.
I don’t think anything good can come of the government deciding to crack down on Steam moderation in order to “save the children”.
The current situation of Steam having a toxic forum community in places is better than whatever happens with “scrutiny”.
If I may put on a tinfoil hat for a moment, this recent push to get Steam labeled as an extremist den that needs to be dealt with feels like yet another attack originating from competitors.
This isn’t the government cracking down, this is the senator writing a letter. There’s no force of government behind this. It’s simply someone in power bringing light to a problem. A problem that we all should acknowledge exists, because it’s very easy to verify.
This is a Senator firing an opening salvo with a vague threat of government action.
Warner also warned, somewhat ominously, that if Valve does not adopt industry-standard moderation practices—whatever that means—it will “face more intense scrutiny from the federal government for its complicity in allowing hate groups to congregate and engage in activities that undoubtedly puts Americans at risk.”
Nothing has been done with government force, yet. Maybe he will drop it, maybe he won’t, but at the moment I’m responding to a Senator floating the idea of using government power to wade into Steam forums.
I’m sure they’re able to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, if you want the government to work on only one thing at a time things will be even worse than they are.
Steam steal all your data and abduct kids into gambling and yet your main concern is reddit toxicity?
Every company everywhere is doing that. There are ways to limit things and be okay with it.
If companies using your data and pushing gambling bothers you, go live off the grid.
If companies using your data and pushing gambling bothers you, go live off the grid.
No, you get your ass off lemmy
I suspect you fit that category of people who are really fun at parties
There’s no suspect you fit into the category of people that shitpost
So?
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.
Old ass boomer fixating on games are evil I guess and finding it deserves more attention than places like Twitter and YouTube filled with influencers who have the captive audience of very susceptible individuals that they are molding them to their image. Maybe focus on the root cause.
So, I guess the quick version is that the fun police are upset because of the gamer word. You know, the one used on Xbox live, a lot…
Which one? There’s a lot of horrible gamer words? Is it the one that begins with R and is five letters long or a different gamer word?
