6d ago

It Turns Out, Steam’s Adult Content Ban Has Been Plotted For A Year And Is Spearheaded By One Of Project 2025’s Leading Voices

www.thegamer.com It Turns Out, Steam’s Adult Content Ban Has Been Plotted For A Year And Is Spearheaded By One Of Project 2025’s Leading Voices

Plans to abolish Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act could have dire consequences for games.

Anyone know if this is true or not?

197 comments

these people have been planning on this for lot longer than a year. christians have been trying to ban video games for decades. the only reason this group hasn't come after more games is because they know they don't yet have enough politicians behind them to manage it.
- Christians are evil
  
  I don't want to come off as pedantic, but what we're dealing with in the US is a very strange and successful breed of "Christian Nationalism."
  Essentially, it's a belief that ultra-conservative Christianity is the only legitimate religion and that the USA is a Christian nation.
  It probably comes as no surprise that these people heavily influenced the Confederacy, is strongly white-supremecist, anti-vice, etc, and has been an anathema in this country since before the states actually formed.
  Christians themselves are... A problem, but not the problem. It's these Christian nationalists. They're loud. They want you to think all Christians believe what they do too. They also tend to drown out opposing Christian speakers by being louder than them too.
  It's one of the reasons why MLK Jr was hated so much by Hoover, by the south, etc. He was a Christian pastor, and stood against everything they did.
  It's important that we don't group Christians in with Christian Nationalists. It's very difficult but necessary.
  
  Mostly because of all the stupid.
  
  All religions are evil.
  
  The bullshit going on in the USA under the christian name is short sighted, stupid and lacks empathy. Christianity isn't USA fundamentalism tho.
  
  Painting with such a broad brush is how these people got to where they are now, don't make the same mistakes they did.
  
  There's a distinctive difference between american evangelists and other christian groups, for starters that the evangelists have been integrated in the state-religion the USA has been running at least since the cold war., and they are actively utilized by the Republicans. This also means that those evangelists believe that in the US white nationalists should be in power.
  Please note that the "christian" part in this has gone pretty far from any christian roots - it's for the most part just utilized to identify the in-group and to radicalize members. The quip "Y'all qaeda" comes pretty close to the truth - they are just as radical and socially regressive as any other islamic sect that would use terror to achieve their goals.
  
  Its Republicans. Don’t blame the religion. Republicans want fascism and they want to control everyone's thoughts and behaviors because they're wired to be subservient to authoritarians. They hate that so many of us have a mind of our own.
- It will never happen on a large scale. Not as long as there is this much money to be made. I have no doubts these freaks will keep trying and make our lives harder, though.
- It's been interesting to see this agenda switch from D to R over the least 30 years in the US.
- christians have been...
  A few closeted and bitter homosexuals in denial have been...
  
  This comment was reported as homophobic.
  I believe the meaning of the comment to be
  Republicans projecting - again
  Leaving it up for @Korkki@lemmy.ml to clarify.

So how does this tie into what's happening now? Part of Vought and Project 2025's plans are to remove Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). This law currently protects platform holders, providing immunity for any content uploaded to said platform that third-party users created.
By removing Section 230, platform holders, like Steam, would be liable for any "illegal" content uploaded to the platform, as opposed to those creating and uploading said content. If Steam were found guilty of hosting this content, the company could be hit with huge fines. Therefore, Steam, Itch, and many other platforms would likely place a blanket ban on any adult content, mitigating any risk of fines or other legal action. This, as pointed out on Reddit, would affect all forms of user-generated content, including fan art, mods, and videos, not just games themselves.
Seems like a deceptive headline.
The real takeaway is: Project 2025 guy also wants to do the platform-level censorship thing, but by removing legal protections (Section 230) instead of using payment processors.
- Yeah I started to read comments on other sites and theres a LOT of speculation on this. But the actual article is pretty small. Thanks for breaking it down even further.
  
  Why did you write the headline ~~in big bold letters~~ that looks like you state something as fact, then ~~in small print~~ at the bottom ask if it's true?
  You are the one that said it was true and you didn't know?
- Hear me out: what if repealing section 230 would end up killing our social media monoculture, since it would be impossible for these platforms to operate. Instead, what if people had to host their content themselves, you know, like we did back in the day, when the Internet was fun.
  
  I don't know when you're talking about, but it probably wasn't self hosting, unless you're talking about like original internet stuff. GeoCities, for example, was not self-hosting. It was hosting your content on their platform.
  
  LLMs would be liable for every hallucination.
  But how do you enforce it? When the internet crashes out into millions of websites again? When the people who made it happen are the people bad ones and they only go after messaging they don’t like?
  
  The wild runaway success of Gmail proves that federation as a concept is currently not understood by the masses. I have lots of faith but little hope that more learning will be done on a large scale.
  
  Who’s going to host a place where you could be sued millions of dollars because someone posted libel on there? Not your next door neighbor.

Anthony Comstock.
J. Edgar Hoover.
Joseph McCarthy.
Roy Cohn.
Donald Trump.
Willful traitors all. Have it writ upon thy meager graves, "destroyed the union just so people wouldn't masturbate."
There's more, I know. But those fellas are all linked.
- Only the most chaste men among them.

I mean, I kind of guessed this way back when Collective Shout pushed their action.
I actually had a comment removed here on Lemmy when I brought up how this was "US politics/elections affecting your life as gamers", because the mods insisted it was purely an Australian action, and my comment was off-topic. But we live in a global online world. There's no way that US politics wouldn't have a huge effect on this type of censorship.
- There’s no way that US politics wouldn’t have a huge effect on this type of censorship.
  I've been called a fearmonger also for trying to tell apathetic gamers who "hate politics" that if they don't get involved they're going to start losing their own goddamn games.
  I have linked the "Conservapedia" articles on video games all over reddit until they banned me. I have tried to tell people that voting for Trump or supporting his ideals even distantly isn't going to "take the woke out of your games" that it will actually crush your gaming entirely, because... and I can't stress this enough, Conservatives HATE GAMING. Not the online chuds and 4channers who hate women, they're barely even conservatives... they're fodder for the online fights. But the old-guard and middle-class conservatives who get marching orders from churches and grifters, the ones who have all the actual money on the right. They want to see an end to "distractions" and fiction and fantasy and everything that isn't some kind of sanitized, un-nuanced devotion to Dear Leader and his United States of White Jesus.
  Fiction has been an enemy of power since writing began, and games are just another kind of fiction that lets people stretch their imagination. This is why it's dangerous, this is why they want to see it ended.
  
  Conservatives HATE GAMING. Not the online chuds and 4channers who hate women, they're barely even conservatives...
  They sure sound like conservatives to me.
  
  Fiction has been an enemy of power since writing began
  x for doubt
  Since there are downvotes, what are the earliest fictional texts and what did they do in regard of power?
- It is as it always was: Even if you have no interest in politics, the politics are interested in you.
  Ordinary people should adopt politics as a hobby, if only to have agency about which type of politics thrives or dies. I would much prefer sex-positive media to proliferate over sex negative, because the latter will take away my hentai games and manga. Furries, queers, and genuine perverts, all of them should have a shared interest of putting conservative values into a pine box, with a bit of stake and garlic.
  
  Furries, queers, and genuine perverts, all of them should have a shared interest of putting conservative values into a pine box, with a bit of stake and garlic.
  And facing towards the earth with their head decapitated and placed between their legs. Kudos in advance if you know what that means.
- No matter how you measure it, global sexually repressive puritanism always traces back to the US.
  
  There are a lot of people that are capable of suppressing women without the US just fine. Just have a quick look at the Arabic peninsula, or the Taliban.
  Western securely repressive puritanism, maybe.
- The US is still the leader of the West, whatever its policies are, they will greatly affect the people in these countries.
  
  The US isn't a leader in anything they are imperialist and they meddle. It's not leadership it's influence. They've consolidated political, economic, and military power and they use all of those to varying degrees to meddle in everyone's affairs

They've been playing the very long game of trying to control human behavior for centuries, not just decades. The one thing to note is that the United States began as a bunch of colonies run by ministers, and the fundies want to go back to that theocratic form of rule. That by the 19th century the temperance movement came from the dozens of Christian subsects. Yeah, they also extended it to anything that did not define as "Christian" behavior, including choice of ideologies (socialism = bad), gender (male or female = good), source of knowledge (Bible > science), beliefs (they have veiled Islamophobia), and even eating and sexual habits.
Now -- based on their basic blueprint -- they want to artificially induce the Second Coming by trying to get their fucking project off the ground, and impose control on everyone else.
BTW, any collapse or devolution of the United States and the Western world would come off as a wonderful realization for Putin, Dugin, Kyrill, and their cronies. That Jesus himself in his actual Middle Eastern appearance and acts of progressivism would be considered an enemy by fundies expecting a "whitened" Jesus.
- First paragraph is about what I found out myself. Might add to that that they are the ones responsible for the American mindset of sex and nipples.
  And yes, Jesus definitely looked like the one who would be selected for a "random intensive control not based on individual suspicion" at the airport. He was born in today’s Israel after all, parents from there as well.
  
  Small correction, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which is in Palestine.
  
  What an average man living in Jesus' time and place looked like.
- Going to need done links for you claims chief
  
  Most of that comment is basic American history chief
- They? For centuries? Who is "they" that has been this organized for "centuries"? The fucking illuminati? The masonic order?
  Maybe you're exaggerating a bit?
  
  Conservatives...? How is that not obvious? It's clearly true.
  
  "they" in this sense is everyone who has historically tried to control and repress others to their own benefit.
  Traditionally that's the religious. But it's also the capitalists. And now they seem to be working together.
  
  Christianity.

Calling it now: What we currently know as “Project 2025” will reveal itself to be the largest conspiracy of this millenium. The push for internet ID verification "to protect the kids" in UK, US, Canada, EU, Australia is 100% a collective effort. Fuck this timeline, we will not comply!
- A conspiracy implies they made an attempt to hide it.
  I've been showing people this shit on social media and reddit for years now and nobody cared. I was called a fearmonger and hyped up "shrill" leftist, stirring up controversy over unrealistic possibilities, etc. etc.
  Fuck all ya'll, I know some of you are out there reading all this, some of the same head-buried-in-the-sand lazy fuckers who tried to dismiss real warnings about real things because you didn't want to be bothered to get involved or change your vote.
  
  More than likely it’s even more petty than that: they just didn’t want to admit to being wrong.
- The English speaking world should be isolated. Rupert Murdoch made it sick.
  
  No he didn't, he doesn't have that kind of power. Not even close.
  A bunch of idiots decided to listen to lies.
- I know this is not going to be well received here, but we as a society do need to do something to prevent children from being able to access pornography. We are just now getting research showing the detrimental effects of social media and internet pornography on developing children's brains. There hasn't been concrete evidence until recently, and now we know. Things do have to change.
  However, this needs to be done with as little information as possible collected and distributed. Zero-knowledge proofs should be used to establish that a person is above a certain age without telling the site what their age actually is. This can be done, however I do imagine they are going to skip past all of that and just go to collecting all the information possible.
  
  No one is saying that kids should be able to access pornography. People are saying that it shouldn't be the states job to raise your children for you.
  Effectively blocking pornography for everyone in the country unless you dox yourself to shady websites is not the answer. The answer is developing the tools and simplifying processes required to stop children accessing these things on the device and local network level and putting those tools in the hands of parents. Doing this is almost certainly orders of magnitude cheaper than trying to police the internet
  The Great Firewall of Britain is a frankly stupid concept.
  
  It's your job to keep your kid from cruising porn on the devices you own
  
  we as a society do need to do something to prevent children from being able to access pornography
  Yes, it's called "parenting"
  
  Fuck that. I was raised in a rural area. My only potential sex partners for my first 20 years of life was my family. Without being able to use dial-up to access hentai manga and VNs, my sexuality would have completely withered on the vine. Many of my years of youth were sexless, and by the time I had some agency, my body wasn't up to the task of enjoying sex for more than several minutes at a time.
  Puritans have no place in dictating who should have porn, because they cannot account for the circumstances or nature of a person's sexual existence. People should be allowed to explore and enjoy sex, and if they don't like it, then they don't have to infringe on other people's ability to partake.
  Porn should be normalized.

Not surprised. stripe, PayPal, visa and Mastercard wouldn't just give up to millions of dollars in fees just because a small Australian group asked for it
- They said please though

Your title is misleading & false. The article is technically correct, but clunky.
Consider the title, Steam's Content Removal Could Be A Wider Consequence Of Project 2025. The article misspells Russell's name frequently. "Part of Vought and Project 2025's plans are to remove Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA)". So the Steam content removal...is a consequence. Who is dishing out the consequences?
Louis Rossmann will tell you, it's Collective Shout. Collective Shout has no relation to Russell Vought...or even America. It's a ragtag group of 1067 Australian fuckheads that complained to Mastercard, Visa who then put pressure on Steam. And yes. This was enabled thanks to Russell Vought & removal of Section 230 of the CDA.
Russell Vought isn't a good guy by any means, but this specifically was done by Collective Shout's 1067 Aussies removed to American credit card companies & American businesses, threatening them & trying to dictate what they can sell to Americans. It's...truly infuriating. I don't go to their mom's place of work & smack the dick out of her mouth, I don't write them emails & tell them how to run Australia. So kindly return the favor, don't fuck with the US. Like what the hell.
- The thing that's been bothering me is, since when did a local, "ragtag group" of activists have this much influence on the actions of massive corporations? Bigger, more powerful groups have tried and failed to make changes like this over and over again. Why does collective shout have so much pull? It doesn't make any sense to me.
  
  This is quite literally the crux of the post: Who is actually making these decisions? Because there is, in fact, a zero percent chance that any number of Australian wokescolds would have leverage to force MASTERCARD AND VISA, the two global monopoly payment processors to change their practices just because the australians dont agree with the content of games.
  This is a top down decision coming from the owners of visa. Any attempt to backpedal this into the hands of some activist group is the most disrespectful patronizing I've seen in my entire life. I'm glad you and others are calling this shit out for the farce that it is.
  You mean to tell me the most successful activist movement in the last 50 years has been a single week protest lobbied at the most powerful capitalist institutions in the world, and the payment processors were bent over backwards for it? As if thats definitely not a giant, flaming red flag in itself?? It feels like the most obvious scapegoating of all time: a faceless Australian group nobody ever heard of before suddenly wrenched the arm of an economic lynchpin? No.
  Visa and Mastercard are doing this because this is what they want to do. No amount of protest would achieve this outcome save the literal socialist revolution at their doorstep. I dont care what any report says, this is top down. Visa is not exposed to any risk by any protest, it is laughable to suggest otherwise.
  With that out of the way, we can discuss the real matters of import: why are payment processors taking on the role of decency enforcement in global markets? What are their goals, who is making these decisions, and why is any government allowing these processors to dictate commerce within their borders unilaterally? Really and truly I dont even care about the games. I want names and faces of the people in charge of visa and Mastercard who are making these decisions, and I want them brought into a court room to clearly explain to everyone in the world what their exact reasoning is for caving to a historically insignificant protest. Stop killing games has been going simultaneously to this and, with millions of signatures, the response has been slander from the companies targeted. This collective shout bs is an absolute sham.
- No fucking way this dude's name is actually Vought...

Not entirely surprising if true.
Project 2025 goal is to spread their backwards ideology across the globe. They want to see the world burn.
- They think being cruel to minorities and women will make their lives better. Cause they're idiots. Or naive. Or hateful. Probably all of those, but that's speculation.
  
  they dont want to make anyones lives better except their own. Pieces of shit like those have been bitter about any improvement to womens rights because they had it good being able to abuse women and want it back. Also minorities are good scapegoat for any problems they cause, so their rights have to go too or the whole thing collapses eventually as people might catch on who is really to blame.

Did you read all 900 pages? I sure skimmed but didn't read it fully. Its entirely possible.
More importantly, if we dont act collectively all over the globe to end this tide of fascism only more sensorship will come.
This is not an end but a beginning.

Oh hey. GamerGate was used by Christian fundamentalists to censor video games. How interesting. I thought they cared about Freeze Peach?
Just stopped over there. They are downvoting anyone who brings up price hikes from tariffs. Their handlers are not happy with the few coming to their senses.
It’s almost like they are pathetic cult members. Who can’t give an inch in an intelligent conversation. Fucking losers.
- Gamergate was always a right-wing radicalization tool, and those who did not dismiss the chatlogs of /pol/ users collected by Zoey Quinn as fakes, knew it since day one (I wonder if "Sarah K." might be one of those VTubers beloved by the far-right), and Steve Bannon wasn't the first one to realize potential in radicalizing gamers, but a crappy Hungarian gamedev later turned into blogger Tamás "Tomcat" Polgár.

a lot of people knew this already, yes

Thank god they can't do shit to TPB and its ilk since those are already illegal anyway.

Americans fucking with the rest of us again? Why am I not surprised.
There's so many good people in that country, I hope they can take down their evil fascist government and restore decency before we have to cut ties entirely to mitigate the damage they're trying to do.
Our alliance with them is currently dying a death by a thousand cuts. Keep this up and eventually it'll be over, sadly.
- More fascists than people willing to stand up to them in the US. They're a lost cause: unless they're able to topple their orange overlord and his cronies the rest of the world should write them off as a loss and stop dealing with them
  
  American here:
  I'd appreciate help from the rest of the world.
  Please embargo us. We need our economy to be in ruins next November, with Trump and his goons as the culprits. Heck - if you can fuck our economy by January, we may even be able to primary some current Republicans so thet Trump is fucked by the midterms no matter which party wins.
- Collective Shout is Australian, but go off.

Freedoms slowly get taken away.

I'm not even slightly surprised

Funny how all the Yanks specifically blaming this on Australia are quiet now.

I am not surprised in the slightest bit

called it.

Can anyone ELI5 this issue for me? At first i thought they were going after those weird upskirt and borderline anime cp games. Are they going after every 18+ game now?
- They were always going to go after every 18+ game and then every queer game under the guise that it's corrupting to youth. The fact that you're confused about that is part of their plan.
  
  Any examples or games they’re going after? Will they go after big studio games that are violent and adult like gta etc?
- Are they going after every 18+ game now?
  No. They're going after all porn.
  
  18+ is not just porn. There is other content with adult themes being lumped in with it. Which is likely the actual goal. To suppress content that would lead someone to form an opinion opposed to their agenda.

Neigsendoig and I are not really surprised by this. We had an inkling this was part of Project 2025. In particular, they just wanted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act removed, though they were already censoring using foreign censorship partners even before P2025.

It's like encountering a sudden storm at sea. But as long as you're prepared, you can get through anything. I've been studying the “2025 Second-Hand Yacht Insurance Guide” lately. It's like my “storm warning at sea,” telling me in advance how to save money and feel at ease, and be fully prepared.

Correlation is not causation.
- I don't understand the hate, so I'll try explaining myself and either redeem myself or dig myself deeper.
  Religious zealots have been trying to ban explicit material since forever.
  Saying Project 2025 caused the Steam ban is like saying Tipper Gore caused Project 2025.
  EDIT: Ok, I went back to make sure I didn't miss something, and I did. This 2025 guy's group pressured the payment companies to put the squeeze on steam, who folded like a house of cards.
  My bad, he did kind of cause this, or at least instigate it.

I'm all in for banning pornographic content but if their intentions is anything else than that then I am all against it.
FYI: I have no idea what the hell is going on, I don't follow the news, I just randomly opened lemmy then stumbled upon this post, I didn't read the whole article, just a paragraph or 2.
- I’m all in for banning pornographic content
  Fuck off. Just don't consume it, idiot.
  If you are worried about your kids getting exposed to it, be a better parent.
  
  Or better yet, don't have kids.
- Very shocking to me that a conservative would barge in with a strong conservative opinion but not know what's going on and having barely tried to find out.
  
  Conservative: "I'd like to enable fascist deletion of sexualized identites"
  Also conservative: insert shaken mr krabs meme
  
  This is sarcasm, right? Surely you jest.
- I’m all in for banning pornographic content
  The issue isn't so much that they're banning pornographic content, it's the fact that there is no possible definition of "pornographic" that people can agree on, and every attempt at trying to do this in the past has always been simply an attempt by lawmakers to legislate what you can and can't enjoy - IE: state approved media that doesn't go against power. We had many court cases about this in the US, they always have ended siding against those trying to censor what people can and can't look at.
  "Porn" is like physics. You can call almost anything porn from certain vantage points, so an open-ended policy that allows those in control to decide what's porn or not allows them to control what you think in a very real way.
  
  The issue isn't so much that they're banning pornographic content
  I agree with your point but also what the hell, why is this considered a normal well adjusted thing to say...
  (second quote from different person)
  I’m all in for banning pornographic content
  Why? What is the flimsy, unscientific, puritan christian conservative reason and why is it ok for people to force it on everybody else?
- it's not about porn, it's about setting a precedent to ban any undesirable content, like trans healthcare resources, sources that show our unsavory history as a society, and literally anything they could want.
  Also, criminalizing porn just makes people go to the black market for that sort of thing.

197 comments