1mo ago

Steam is 'an unsafe place for teens and young adults': US senator warns Gabe Newell of 'more intense scrutiny' from the government if Valve doesn't take action against extremist content

www.pcgamer.com Steam is 'an unsafe place for teens and young adults': US senator warns Gabe Newell of 'more intense scrutiny' from the government if Valve doesn't take action against extremist content

US Senator Mark Warner comes less than a week after an ADL report accusing Steam of "normalizing hate and extremism in the gaming community."

Games @lemmy.world

www.pcgamer.com /software/platforms/steam-is-an-unsafe-place-for-teens-and-young-adults-us-senator-warns-gabe-newell-of-more-intense-scrutiny-from-the-government-if-valve-doesnt-take-action-against-extremist-content/

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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
  
  Wasn't it co-opted by racists around 2016 or something? They also took the "OK" finger gesture from the circle game, the fuckers.
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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???
- 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.

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.

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.
- 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.

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.

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.
- 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?
  
  I suspect you fit that category of people who are really fun at parties
  
  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.

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.

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

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?

PCGamer really hates doing journalism mhm ? You have to figure out which link goes back to the actual article about the mentioned report, and then find which link directly goes to the report : https://www.adl.org/resources/report/steam-powered-hate-top-gaming-site-rife-extremism-antisemitism
The full report actually provides a lot more information and answers some legitimate questions, and other ignorant comments raised in here, there's an entire appendix about their method and how they fine tuned an ai model to review 150+ million profile pictures / 600+ million comments
There's also interesting info about the customization of Steam profile, which I don't remember Steam publicly sharing :
At the time of data collection, Steam Community had 458.32 million users. Of these, 418.4 million were public profiles and 39.68 million were private profiles (even if a profile was private, there was certain related information that was publicly available).
Many of Steam Community’s 458.32 million users have not customized their accounts extensively. Only 7.4% of public profiles have a summary, Steam Community’s equivalent of a social media bio. 41.8% of profiles use Steam community’s default profile picture, making it the most common avatar on Steam, present on 191.2 million profiles.
Most Steam Community users are also not particularly active. One proxy for activity is player level, which users can increase by activities such as buying games or collecting trading cards while playing games on Steam. Among the 91.69% of Steam Community users who publicize their level, the average level is 2.8 and the median level is 0.0 (the maximum level observed was 5,001). Our detections should be interpreted with this context in mind.
- Thank you for linking this.
- SHIT TONS of smurf accounts for games like Dota, CSGO, and other stuff that I'd often see with no profile customization. Would make sense if tons of accounts are side accounts

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...

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 "removed" 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

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.

On Jan. 3rd, this will switch to a Republican senator saying the same thing, but the "extremist content" will be "woke."

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.
- Sticks and stones,. something something something....

Literally turning america entirely into an unsafe place then threatening others for it. Are they trying to do a government take over of a shiny appealing money maker? It sure seems like they actually want the nazis everywhere else, I bet if they actually do anything they will keep the nazis if they actually exist in the first place.
- By "turning America into an unsafe place" do you mean to accuse the Democrats, one of which is behind this?
  
  Not all democrats are progressives. It's a big tent party.
  
  I don't think that even matters. There are plenty of people that would surely be best simply deleted regardless of their affiliation. The us needs a revolution at this point. canada isn't even that far behind. our former liberal party in the last while changed their name, then just fused with the conservative party. so now we are also down to two parties plus a bunch of effectively useless riffraff.

ADL report
Opinion discarded. Those ADL fucks lie about damn near everything.

Steam discussion forums on every game are a complete dumpster fire. Someone needs to do better, whether it is Steam themselves or moderators.
- Steam discussion forums ... kind of famously do not have or require any active, human moderation.
  Basically, there's a simple 'foul word detector', and that's about it.
  You could nuke everything that is not a manually pinned thread, and nothing of value would be lost.

Meanwhile in Ohio...
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/18/us/columbus-ohio-neo-nazi-march-hnk/index.html

they go after my hobbies and i will turn into extremist
- The nazis, or the government?
- They're creating the one thing they want to destroy. lol

Unsafe? Like is the game going to stab them?
- It's a great place to create extremists, there is basically no moderation and people say some fucking awful shit on Steam forums. I think this is a long time coming, honestly.
  
  I just see people in the discussions forums talking about how to get all the achievements in Stellaris

If we're pitching microtransactions as extremist content, I'm on board.

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.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion

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.

What has Valve done right?
Proton
Steam
Steam deck
Steam market (the place to sell underpriced skins for small amounts of money) What has Valve done wrong?
Loot boxes
Moderation (it is impossible)
Their anti-cheat (Swiss cheese of anti-cheats, >!EAC and BattlEye are better!<)
Overall, I prefer Valve and Steam over a Chinese holding firm that almost has the monopoly over the gaming industry and the company with a black logo that has a close-minded CEO and Sweeney'd to Tencent.
- Beyond all of those, there's GOG.
  
  Even with GoG, you still pay for a license. Yes it's better because you can get all the files for another install, but if you don't own it why pay for it?
- Their anti-cheat
  Honestly, this seams a bit unfair. My understanding is that VAC is free or very inexpensive and pretty decent, while other options are potentially better for some cases and more expensive. Valve making a reasonable anti-cheat available is a good thing IMO.
  So it existing is a good thing, it just may be the wrong fit for a given game (e.g. more popular games probably need a more intense anti-cheat).
  If a game isn't detecting cheaters well enough, blame the game, not the anti-cheat system it uses.

To be fair, it is full of racist and fascist stuff. You can report them but Valve doesn't do anything.
- Welcome to the Internet
  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.

I'm not exactly on steam much, what tf are they taking about?
- The steam social/discussion stuff is a cesspit of racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc., has been for quite a while.
  
  Well, yeah, it's a place where gamers are allowed to speak. That's what happens.
- It's a place where ~~anyone~~ kids can buy games, and you know that isn't allowed in America. They should be in a factory or a church!

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.

It's as if the new admin is trying really hard to find new ways to be face-eating-leopards to the gen z male faces that voted them into power.
- Jesus, these comments.
  Mark Warner is a Democrat
  He was not up for re-election this year.
  
  Kind of amazing how there's so many knee-jerk reactions in here from people who don't bother to read or understand the situation. Almost like the senator has brought light to a situation that many people were either unaware of or willfully ignorant of. Amazing how it's people's reactions that convince you of the veracity of a story more than the story itself.
  
  Yeah mb turns out hes just a regular 70 year old DNC.
- Well I mean, at least they are keeping an election promise?
  Not that it's a good promise to be keeping though
- Do you seriously think this is a Trump administration move...? The fuck does he care about extremism, he creates it.

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?

A good old crusade against videogames.

GabeN: There is nothing you can say to stop me from selling Furry Hitler

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.

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.

Asshead.

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.

Silence, Fed.
The ADL is a joke. Since they called Pepe a hate symbol. It’s just an meme.
- People should read history of ADL and how it was started. That will tell you what you need to know about these parasites

OK, there, Tipper.

Gabe could turn off the entire friends feature and not get a bit of pushback since everyone uses discord anyway.
If it's about Team Fortress 2...alright, yeah. I get it.

"they dare to make money without us!"

Steam has abduct kids into gambling for a decade and no authority ever gave a shit about it. The government wants a bigger piece of the cake of an increasing market.

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