1mo ago

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

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

A senator for the US government has called on Valve to address complaints about the amount of racist, sexist and hateful posts by users on Steam.

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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Get rid of actual fascist imagery and references? Yes please. That shit is rampant.
Get rid of fucking Pepe? ..Are you kidding? Way to make yourself and your argument seem fully out of touch. Yeah, sure, there was a point when Pepe was being coopted by right-wingers, but at this point? Like.. have you been on discord once ever? Everybody uses Peepo. Moreover, half my trans friends use D&D emojis derived directly from Peepo.
People pointing fingers at Pepe are literally taking the bait and making themselves look less credible, which was presumably the point of it being adopted by assholes to begin with. That fight is over and we won and took it back. Yeesh.
- They can't do this to peepo, not my boy! 😥

What industry standards is he talking about here? Steam code of conduct only says you must engage in lawful behaviour. There's no American law banning far-right symbols. There's no doubt Steam has a content moderation issue and I would love to see those things go as well. But unless there's some kind of law then Valve is just going to ignore this problem like they've done in the past.
- Well, name another game platform that openly allows swastikas. I think they are saying the rest of the industry largely doesn't allow this so Valve shouldn't either.
  
  No other gaming platform has the userbase Steam does. I see this more of a numbers thing than anything else. If 2% of the gaming population is far right then it's going to be much more noticeable when one company has a userbase of ~100million. I'd be very surprised if the other companies like Ubisoft and EA have this kind of content moderation.
  
  Roblox. It’s a game but also a platform in a sense. It’s full of kids running around yelling racial slurs, kicking users with dark coloured avatars, and lots of far right content. It is like a grade school run by 4chan.
  
  Do American streets count as a platform?

I have never seen a swastika on steam... how do you guys find them? I have come across "git gud" idiots and met one single nazi on there. What in the world are you people up to?
instances of Pepe the frog, a meme appropriated by the far right
LOl, get outta here. I use pepe all the time. It's a friggin' frog. I won't let the far right take him away from me. Fuck off.
- You literally just need to go into the discussion boards for trending games or check out the curation pages for groups like "DEI watch." Guaranteed to find comments and posts of huge ASCII swastikas eventually. There's next to no moderation for any given game's discussion board or comments for anything related to it (workshop, screenshots, other media, etc).
  
  You literally just need to go into the discussion boards for trending games or check out the curation pages for groups like “DEI watch.”
  I just spent 10 minutes doing both of these things and didn't see any questionable content.
  I did see gamers saying things like "this game sucks", but nothing worse.
  At this point I think you should provide a link to an example.
  
  I frequent Steam discussions on and off to see what morons say. BG3, Veilguard, anything they accuse of DEI or whatever. In all of my scrolling I've never encountered a swastika or someone just straight up being a white supremacist. I'm sure it's there somewhere, but it's not rampant. I also see a lot of moderation in those discussions. Goobers getting banned all the time. So if it is, I do think it's getting moderated to some extent. That probably also falls on the game dev I guess. Not sure who controls the discussion forums.
- Yeah, I'm definitely in favor of banning the edgy kids who use fascist imagery on the platform, but Pepe is not and has never been that. Just because some assholes tried to appropriate it for a few months doesn't mean everyone else should just surrender it to them.
  
  I get it there... but sadly to my knowledge it is lost. Generally speaking when you see the "SomeoneNew has joined the server" and see a pepe avatar... I already pretype the /ban SomoeneNew command watch the screen for 15 seconds... and 9/10 times they say something blatantly racist within that time-frame.
  (and don't think that 1/10 that they don't means 10% aren't alt right... of those that don't manage to break the rules in the first 30 seconds, I don't think I've seen one that's gone a week without doing so)
  Point is... Pepe is the modern swastika... For those who don't know, the swastika was a peaceful symbol used by many different cultures for thousands of years. But the fact is, using it now just gives legitimacy to those who have attached it to their hateful messages.
  
  Yeah, and Chaplin had the mustache first!
- A signal is less useful the more "false" signals (i.e. noise) pollute the medium it's transferred over.
  If we can make it clear that "their" memes aren't actually just theirs by "re-appropriating" them and abuse whatever secret identification dogwhistles they want to use, we can drown their signals in noise.
  Posting Pepes for non-nazi purposes is an act of resistance.
- Play enough Dota 2 and you'll find them soon enough

Steam has had, for a long time already, a massive far-right community. Browse its communities and you'll see the most deranged racist, transphobic, homophobic posters. The entire SweetBaby harassment campaign started - and as far as I know, is still going - thanks to a huge Steam curator, and there are even more "Anti-Woke" groups explicitly dedicated to harassing minorities. Last year, Hogwarts Legacy had a intense campaign and won the Best Game on Steam Deck award due to the brigading of these "anti-woke" fans - and you most likely can still look into its community to witness their efforts - and there are still those on the Tabletop Simulator communities that are outspoken about the devs "bending the knee" by removing global chat from their game in an effort to reduce harassment against queer people.
Basically, its a cesspool of the worst gaming has to offer, but none of this affects Valve's bottom line, who continues their usual business practice: Don't interfere and do the minimum amount of work. Is it illegal? Perhaps not. But their inaction makes it clear that this is a safe spot for hateful conduct.
- Also have noticed the "anti-woke" "curator".
  It's simply amazing. Imagine not buying a game because the protagonist is a woman. If you don't want to play Control, you're missing out.
  
  just a cesspool of rizzless dudes trying to impress other rizzless dudes with how edgy they can be by shrinking their worldview.
- I made the mistake of looking at the Spider-Man discussion board. The entire first page, minus like three posts, was all idiots complaining about pride flags.
  
  Sadly it's like that for pretty much any game.
  On the bright side, a lot of them are bots just trying to influence real people. Unfortunately, it is people who made these bots who probably do have that hatred. And of course, not all of them are bots...
  Remember to check the discussion board posts themselves (each comment), if there is a mouse icon, it means they own/play the game. If there is no mouse icon, they do not.
  With this in mind, you'll notice the bot propaganda posts 90% of the time have not played nor own the game. At least on Steam, they may have pirated the game to play it, then decided to post on discussion boards about how empathy and recognizing of othe- sorry, "wokeness" is killing gaming.
  It's so stupid how hatred stifles discussion. Ironically hating the things just makes them focus on it more.

I think the issue is possibly rooted deeper than just usage on steam. I mean I know steam could/SHOULD do more to fight it, but I mean...has said US senator looked at the newly elected government and the people that voted for said government? I mean damn dude.
The rot is deep and is very soon going to be considered "default" behavior.

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
  
  I guess I've been out of the loop for pre-hate Pepe (pre-2016), but the only reason I know of him at all is because of all the Nazi/Quon/KKK folks blasting him all over Twitter and everywhere else. I've always assumed everyone knew since it's been almost a decade, and anyone using him these days is doing so in bad faith.
- 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.
- 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”

Imagine taking the ADL seriously.
- Imagine using ad hominem to dismiss factual and easily verifiable points.
- What's your problem with ADL? I'm not very familiar with them.

Curious what industry standard Senator Warner is judging Valve against because a social media site, which Warner is comparing Valve to, being filled with Nazis and the far right feels like the standard, even if some sites at better at quarantining them than others. Also, "intense scrutiny" from Congress is kind of an empty threat at the best of times, but especially when Congress is about to be run by the sort of people who aren't going to see this as a problem.

We've come across it all too often, even personally been attacked before just for asking a game to fix its pronoun usage before.
Now we just don't bother saying anything and keep reporting until something is done.

Whataboutism to avoid the conversation talking about Twitter
- Why would a gaming news website talk about twitter? How is it whataboutism? Two things can be bad at the same time.
  
  Not the gaming site article. The senator themselves

NataliePortman.gif: to remove them, right?

I have it all censored and replaced by hearts.

Whatever the result in, I wish there won't be over-moderation that too Western-centric.
Not all swastika are Nazi (I live in a country where swastika is simply symbol of religion and peacefulness). Not all words that too similar with offending word in English are bad (some games literally banned Indonesian for having "nasi goreng" as their name, too similiar with Nazi they said.)

Who or what is actually the authority that decides which symbols used by Nazis are now owned by them? What are the factors to get saved (besides money)?

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