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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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  • 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).

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