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Valve must address swastikas and other hate on Steam, writes US senator in a letter to Gabe Newell

In the letter, Democrat senator Mark Warner argues that Valve's content moderation doesn't meet industry standards, and says he wants Valve to "crack down on the rampant proliferation of hate-based content".

The exact hateful stuff he's talking about was highlighted in that report by the Anti-Defamation League last week. Its many findings include swastikas in profile pictures, antisemitic images such as the "happy merchant", and instances of Pepe the frog, a meme appropriated by the far right that - let's be honest - has never washed the stink off. Steam is "inundated with hate" as a result of these findings, say the anti-discrimination group.

While the simmering bubbles of fascism won't be news to the average Steam user (or average internet user, to be frank) that doesn't mean we ought to get complacent about them. It's proof, says senator Warner, that Valve is lacking good moderation.

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  • Swastikas, okay. Happy merchant, sure. But how is Pepe an alt right symbol now? I read half of an article about it which seems to conclude that it depends on the context the meme is being used in. If it's by a nazi in their username, it's a nazi symbol, wow. To me this feels like "serial killers often ate bread for breakfast, so all of Germany is now a dogwhistle for serial killers."

    Edit: Alright, I'm super late in this edit but I see that I'm (partly) wrong here. Not sure if people who reply to a comment are notified when that comment has been edited (if not, it should do that!), but thank you a lot for the input. My understanding now is tht it's a quite complicated issue and, depending on the audience, it's certainly being used and understood as Nazi symbol.

    • Pepe was previously coopted by far-right groups. The usage has died down since the creator of the original comic began suing people, but there are still people who put Pepe in Trump hats and shit.

    • Pepe has been sensationalized for a while now in the media as being a hate symbol. I think it's because you see it largely on 4chan which traditional media demonizes.

      I'm not on 4chan, but it seems like it has similar problems to Steam: a large userbase and poor content moderation gives insufferable people a platform to spread hate from. These problems aren't unique to either platform, but the news likes to latch on to them.

      I hate that some people consider Pepe to be a hate symbol. He's just an expressive frog, dang it

    • Pepe has been a dogwhistle/symbol of hate for years already. Richard Spencer's comical punch in 2017 happened just moments after he was explaining why he wears a Pepe pin. The ADL has it officially registered as a hate symbol.

      Maybe it has died down in recent years, but you not being aware of these - frankly, very clear cut - definitions doesn't make it ridiculous or inappropriate. Nazis take over symbols, that has been their modus operandi since their inception. None of this is new.

      I'd recommend some googling about the subject.

      • You may be willing to cede the cartoon frog to the Nazis for their exclusive use, but many people aren't. If you assume that everyone you see using it is one you'll be vastly overestimating the number of Nazis in the world.

        • I'm not "willing" to do anything, it is a fact. You may as well argue about the origins of the Swastika or the Iron Cross. Pepe is a hate symbol, and while not everyone using it might be a nazi, they are using nazi imagery. The fact that "many people" aren't willing to drop it, despite its extensive, well documented use by extremists is a well made point, but not the one you think.

          And there's no "overestimating" of nazis in the world. We live in a culture of white supremacy. There's no point in splitting hairs about how offensive or not a cartoon frog is. The easiest solution is to simply not use it.

          • Equating a meme that has a variety of potential uses to a swastika is absolutely unhinged

            • The Swastika interestingly is four right angles, so the symbol occurs all over human society hundreds and even thousands of years before Nazism found it.

              People thought any symbol so common throughout history had to be a quasi-good thing. They used it as a general sign of good luck. About the only thing that even comes close to the swastikas ubiquity and thrust of sentiment post-war is the "smiley face" symbol.

              The Nazis saw all this and sent scam archeologists around the world to unearth and then piece together a narrative that their Aryan supermen ancestors had been the rightful masters of the earth. From the moment they made that decision, it's had the stink of human ashes wafting off it ever since. Fire, wind, fortune, 'North', Kali's creative destruction, and dozens more meanings all wiped away. So many cultures and groups robbed of a symbol or perhaps a phoneme even with their own contexts.

              Draw the right angles. It is the wheel that crushes now. It means hate. We have a conditioned response as a society to it and each one of us personally has our own gutteral secret feelings about it. But the old meanings are all dead.

              One of fascism's best features is simply bald faced stealing. They stole that symbol from thousands or millions of people who used it every day. Pepe at least carries his own eternal chagrinn with him in protest of being used as a dogwhistle, but thats about it. His expressions are your expressions.

              Pepe is damaged goods though. He endures well past his relevance and utility as an internet comic character when very similar concepts (rage faces, Polandball) have had their time and slowly lost ubiquity. But Pepe endures not JUST as a Nazi dogwhistle but as a symbol that even if someone is not right wing they still would like to convey a certain unsociable edginess, like a colorful threat display on a jungle animal. The disposessed middle class, the failure to launch kids, the kissless sensitive souls, all find commonality with the frowning frog. And these are the people they target. People use Pepe as a flare to suggest they're in pain and only feel safe talking about it to other anonynous people on the same boat. Aka the most vulnerable to radicalization. Clinging to Pepe is advertising that you are looking for something that you don't even know what it is, but normies can't or won't give it to you. Pepe is a green light to radicalization.

              And like the various versions of the swastikas before they became THE Swastika, Pepe did nothing to deserve this. Just like everyone else under Nazi occupation.

              • But the old meanings are all dead.

                I'm sorry, but this is completely false. The swastika is still used all across the world for its original meanings. If you'd said this about e.g. Norse symbols like the Valknut or Sonnenrad, I'd be 1000% on board with you, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've not been to anywhere that Buddhism is common if you think everyone associates the swastika with Nazism.

                There are specific versions of the swastika that Nazi Germany created that are only associated with Nazism, such as the 45-degree rotated swastika, or obviously any swastika embedded within another German military symbol, but to assert that the basic symbol itself has been co-opted is very Euro-centric.

                • Its a complicated thing for sure. I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of peace? If it isn't fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O'odham feel like they HAD to?

                  And that was a decade before the mass killings of the Holocaust. A decade before America intervened.

                  I fear the answer is there is no right answer. Sometimes groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that, but like hell was it fair to them.

                  • I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of piece? If it isn’t fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham feel like they HAD to?

                    Are you asking me to speak to this? I can't speak to the personal motivations or viewpoints of either Native American tribes, nor of a myriad of Asian cultures. But I can say that I don't personally believe it is either fair, appropriate, or necessary for Buddhists to stop using a symbol they've used for thousands of years in order to distance themselves from a group they are not in fact associated with.

                    groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that

                    I think you may have fallen prey to a false narrative around this. From what I'm seeing, the "whirling log" (the native american symbol that resembles the swastika) was mostly dropped due to pressure from white people over their own white guilt and the politics around Nazism, not out of some collective spontaneous show of empathy, and never actually fell out of use completely, and is now being actively reclaimed by various native americans.

                    During World War II, Eskeets said the U.S. government asked the Navajo to “hold off” on using the symbol. So for an unknown amount of time, Eskeets said metalsmiths, weavers and other artists stopped incorporating it into their work. That helped create the misconception that items with a whirling log are no longer being made at all.

                    It's apparently still being actively used by the Navajo, as well, but they tend not to talk to white people about it since people can't have a normal one.

                    The sacredness of the “whirling log” makes it challenging to get some Native Americans to speak to non-Natives about the subject. That’s according to Edison Eskeets, a trader at The Hubbell Trading Post, a national historic site and the oldest operating trading post on the Navajo Nation and in the United States. Several Navajo artists were contacted and either didn’t respond to requests or hung up the phone when asked to speak about the symbol’s significance.

                    Eskeets said the whirling log represents humanity and life and is still used for healing in hundreds of Navajo ceremonies.

                    “It kind of has everything on it,” he said. “It represents the constellation, the moon, the sun, the equinox. It’s down to the earth, the four directions, the rotation of mother earth, all of that … it’s the rotation of life.”

                    • Thank you for educating me, I absolutely did get the sappy propaganda version of that story. I do WISH we could convince people not to use the symbol but I admit that's something I only wish was possible because it would give us a prescriptive answer to emerging hate symbols.

                      On a long enough timescale maybe people can recoup the symbol back to its/their original forms; but we live now, and I find it unlikely. And the danger we face now from symbols with plausibly deniable hate built into them is considerable.

                      Did you notice we were talking about an emergant cartoon frog hate symbol and now we're having a one hundred year old debate about the last great hate symbol? If we don't draw lines, what is the protocol of protecting ourselves from fully unironic uses of would be hate symbols? I am not saying CENSOR PICTOGRAMS I DON'T LIKE. I am saying there isn't a way to stop people from abusing our reticence towards censorship and tolerance of the gray without intense scrutiny and educating people about the symbols. That does kinda mean telling Buddhists that their sign of peace is our sign of death. First the culture shock, then the bitter arguments and singed pride. What should come next then?

                      • I think you are looking for a unified solution to deal with very different and very nuanced problems.

                        The swastika was chosen by Hitler as a means to legitimize his movement. It's important to remember that the average 1920s German had little formal schooling in world history. Even compared to our shitty and revisionist US curriculum, they had next to nothing. He could co-opt it and people were legitimately like, "wow, that's crazy, I absolutely have never heard of Buddhism or Hinduism or anything. Maybe we really did used to rule all of them". The Nazi swastika was at no point a dogwhistle, it's a very explicit and bold statement of their false identity. It was an assertion of power and authority. If you cede the symbol to them, you are intrinsically acknowledging them as the "legitimate" owners of that symbol, which they are not. You can very easily distinguish between a swastika that is being flown as a white supremacist symbol, and one that is not. No Nazis are building Buddhist temples or weaving faux-Native American textiles just so they can have a "plausibly deniable" swastika, nor using pictures of those items to masquerade as non-Nazis with a nudge and a wink (because that would hurt their 'pride'). They just use Nazi imagery directly.

                        To attack this, you need to very actively de-legitimize its improper usage, and boost its proper usage. The message cannot be "yes, this thousands of years old symbol really is about the Nazis", because that is the stance of the Nazis themselves. It has to be, "fuck off Nazis, that's not your's, and we're going to actively weed out your bullshit".

                        On the other side are symbols like Pepe, where the purpose was never about legitimizing their ideology, but in fact to hide it and dogwhistle. The creator of Pepe is attempting valiantly to do exactly what I said above, but I think that while getting Nazis to stop using it (and everything else, air included) is great, there is no wider history or adoption that makes Pepe worth using elsewhere. It was just a cartoon frog. In this case, drawing a direct line between people who choose to represent themselves with Pepe, and with the shitty ideologies they're using it to dogwhistle about, is actually the best counter to them, because a dogwhistle isn't a dogwhistle if the relationship is explicit and universally understood.

                        Banning Pepe outright in Steam profiles makes complete sense to me, because it sends the message that "we know what you're using this to mean, and you're not fooling anyone, dumbass".

                        Whereas IMO Valve should make it very clear that swastikas will be reviewed, and any Nazi swastikas will result in an immediate ban, whereas use in the legitimate meanings will not be (and that they will take context into consideration, i.e. user location, other profile info, past handles, discussion comments, etc etc).

              • The difference here being that the swastika was used as the official symbol of a fascist government that conquered a substantial portion of Europe and perpetrated the holocaust. Outside of contexts where its religious significance overshadows this, it's pretty universally associated with Nazis, and even in the places where its other uses are overshadowed it's presented differently than the black, tilted swastika in the middle of a white circle on a red field. There are swastikas on the sign of a local Indian restaurant down the street from me, but nobody confuses them with the very clear nazi version. Pretty unambiguous.

                Meanwhile Pepe, a relatively recent creation, was coopted by a handful of fascists who don't use it as their primary symbol and haven't done anything nearly as drastic or impactful with it, and has since become a widely used emoji character with a huge number of variations that's used by all sorts of people. Have fascists made use of it? Yeah. But most of the people using these emojis in their discord posts have nothing to do with alt-right fascists and aren't even especially likely to be right-wingers in any sense at all.

                It simply doesn't have the same connotation that the symbols it's being compared to here do. It's easy for people who aren't versed in spaces where it's used regularly and innocuously to assert that it is, but that doesn't make it any more true.

                What it does do is make those people seem incredibly out of touch to people who are accustomed to seeing cringespin and sleepypeepo and grabbyhands in their discord chats posted by literal queer leftists.

            • I feel like you had to be there. Frankly, the pepe symbol was co-opted so whether you like it or not, you should be cognizant of its history and how people choose to use it.

              Every point the other user is making - the iron cross, the swastika, the SS, people know even if they weren't there because of how apparent the symbols were and why they were used.

              Then there are dog whistles when it became wrong to hold hateful beliefs and people started using combinations of the numbers 1488 or two H's simultaneously. Pepe was co-opted and used as 4chans alt right mascot and spread out beyond it, into internet campaigns for fascism (not just pro-Trump). That's the thing about co-opting symbols, fascism doesn't care what they stand for, if they like it, it's very difficult to keep it safe. A prime example of this is the fictional, known cop-killer Frank Castle, The Punisher, being co-opted by cops and white supremacists. His logo should instill fear into the fascists heart, instead his logo has been the conservatives wet dream since the 1980's, and was seen in 2017 during Charlottesville.

              Pepe's usage dying down because people were getting sued doesn't mean that it suddenly stopped being used by shitty people, it just means it's swept under the rug with all their other dog whistles. Post 2016 Pepe was abducted and reused just like every other hate symbol. Fascists are never creative enough to make something of their own so almost every single symbol that's currently tied to the ideology has been stolen.

              I would say that you are right that post 2016 Sad Pepe isn't 100% alt-right, but to be honest these style of memes do not last very long. Each generation of meme lasts about 3 to 5 years and they only really last in that generation of people who enjoyed them. That is to say, kids on the Internet now don't know Pepe's history. Would they use him? Maybe, except definitely not because they don't use memes like that, Gen Z and Gen A do not use TopText BottomText memes, character memes, old RageFu memes.

              Memes of today have variations of GigaChad and the anti-NPC (they don't know I'm ____, or crying behind the mask) which are developed RageFu characters. Pretty much only Sad Pepe exists in this sphere and isn't entirely co-opted, but even then, Sad Pepe is also commonly used on boomer Facebook for posts when men hate their wives.

              I agree that it sucks to lose something to fascism. Pepe didn't deserve it. But like all memes, his history ran its course and he won't be used in many new ways anymore. The people who are still using him are using him for specific reasons beyond just nostalgic meme. But who knows, memes cycle. Maybe he will be brought back with a new vigor for anti-Nazi memes created by leftists. Until then though, all you need to do is just look up various events and "Pepe" and you'll see a whole new side of Pepe that maybe you hadn't realized. Pepe and Elon, Pepe and Trump, Pepe and Putin... Okay I went to Google that last one myself out of curiosity and literally an Iron Cross Pepe sniping Hillary Clinton. I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP.

              I suggest, "was Pepe meme at Charlottesville 2017" and going to images. Another good choice would be "was Pepe meme at January 6th".

              Pepe was not present in 2017, but it shows you the type of memes he's used in. Pepe however, was present in D.C. on January 6th. Sorry for the BuzzFeed article but it had the image.

              You can defend Pepe all you like, I know that in his heart he is not a hate symbol. But Pepe is being used as one, so you need to be critical of when you see him and why. It might be completely innocent, but you must know that the chances of that are low. At least now hopefully you aware of his history and why others are skeptical and critical of his usage. Other meme characters don't get dressed up to play political hitman. Other meme characters aren't as heavily used by conservatives

          • It really does depend on how many those "many people" are. Too many to dismiss them as irrelevant, it appears to me.

    • It was pretty heavily associated with the alt right a decade ago as it was getting more popular. Some alt right meme communities like frenworld and clown world were centered around it, with overtly fascist pepe variants. It's gotten more popular in a lot of other circles, but if someone identifies enough with it to use as a profile picture I'd at least check their posting history.

    • Pepe was used as the mascot for all sorts of content on Reddits “the_donald”

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