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…
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.
What comes to my mind is Battlefront 2, which is sold by Steam. I think I paid $5 for it since I boycotted it back when it first came out to due to loot crates… anyway, I regularly see the n-word used in this game every. single. night. It’s used specifically to denigrate people of color, in violent and extremely racist ways.
I don’t understand how players with maxed out accounts are able to keep them when they are saying this stuff. How is that not flagged for immediate review? EA is a trash company, and Steam may want to stop selling their games if they can’t do the BARE MINIMUM to combat this sort of behavior.
Yes, moderate all of that shit off every mass social media system steam, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blue sky, tiktok, YouTube, etc. Debate and compromise on a common set of standards, one for kids spaces and another for adults, and enforce the same rules to everyone with penalties tied to annual revenues so they can’t report one set of numbers to shareholders and another when it comes time to pay for the damages they caused by ignoring regulations. That is what regulating and building new markets should look like when you don’t have a corrupt oligarchy filled with bribery and regulatory capture.
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.
To be fair, it is full of racist and fascist stuff. You can report them but Valve doesn’t do anything.
Is it worse then twitter or facebook? Also, can we stop infantilizing “young adults”? They’re trying to discredit anyone’s opinion who isn’t a senior citizen.
Yes, it’s worse. It is.
Did the Steam forums plot to over throw the US election? Are there private Police Union communities on Steam?
ADL report
Opinion discarded. Those ADL fucks lie about damn near everything.
So what gaming platform is Gabe Neweel and His friends part of. Cause this is not about valve. And obviously about making room for a competitor.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Are you really sitting here trying to excuse nazism, death threats, and promotion of terrorism?
I won’t excuse death threats because those are generally targeted, and are explicitly illegal.
Nazism and promotion of terrorism are explicitly illegal in some places, while death threats are not explicitly illegal everywhere. So does your opinion on these flip flop depending on where you live?
How about grow a spine and get some morals of your own? Ones that are not dependent on whatever is legal where you are currently located.
If nazism and promotion of terrorism are fine with you, I don’t think you are going to find very many friends here.
the primary reason I’m fine with terrorism is related to how broadly it can be defined and how some people like to expand its definition to silence those they don’t like, same with naziism and how some like to associate anti israilism with nazism. the government should leave the regulations of speech up to the platform and treat them like public bulliton boards (freely accessible to everyone and barely regulated)
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.
Agree and using the same approach. Only limitation is purchases, they can’t spend money.
It never stops with parental control. Corps will use it for their own CYA policy as well, specifically age restricting everything
Yup, I actually refuse to allow them to play any games with MTX, at least for now (they’re still young). So Fortnite et al are outright banned in my house because I don’t want them getting used to that environment just yet. We’ll probably get there, but they’re haven’t yet learned how to manage money properly and defer gratification, and I don’t think the consequences of MTX are steep enough to properly teach that lesson. And this isn’t just for them, I ban myself as well, and I’d like to ban my wife, but she gets to make her own choices since she’s an adult.
I totally give them money they can spend on other things, and my older kid has absolutely learned that spending it all at once is a poor choice, but they’re still too impulsive for me to let them loose on predatory games.
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.
This is also how I became an Internet plumber.
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.
That’s completely fair. IMO, engaged parent > parental controls > absentee parent.
Sticks and stones,. something something something…
