- cross-posted to:
- gamedev_news@programming.dev
- furiouslyinfuriating@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- gamedev_news@programming.dev
- furiouslyinfuriating@sh.itjust.works
Bluesky Post (this was also posted on twitter)
I was hoping to find a statement from the aggressor, but it seems to be too early.
It’s it anti video games to point out something that is actually happening? Just because you love the company doesn’t mean that any bad news is an attack against the industry. Valve doesn’t want to moderate their forums, it was bound to happen.
I am a big GOG enjoyer myself, but when I need to use steam for anything, I have never encountered such content. Perhaps there is such content in private or otherwise not very visible spaces (such as user profiles), where they will not get reported, but that is true for any site with user content. I call BS on this being an issue.
Really? Because in my experience you have to wade through racist, homo- and transphobic, and misogynistic shit the second you foolishly open the discussions page on any game that features black or brown, LGBTQIA, and/or female characters.
Much of that is just bots and if you spend any measurable time on the internet you start to ignore stuff with variable capital letter words and emoji spam so it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that the person you’re responding to, doesn’t see that stuff. I don’t really either. My brain auto filters paragraphs of anti woke/racist rhetoric like pop-up ads.
As I said, I have never seen anything I would consider extremist myself. Though from your reply, I get the feeling the issue could be an unreasonably broad definition of extremist content on your side. That or I just happen to not visit games with such discussions.
I guess it depends on the game, extremely so. Two main factors I can think of: Whether or not the game has been picked up as an object of hate by the “anti-woke” content mill, as well as the average age of people who play the game.
Just for kicks I skimmed the BG3 forum and indeed there’s this recent post. Apparently unwanted exposure to Gale’s gayness can be solved by not interacting with Gale, who would have thought and that’s a perfectly valid solution for OP, but some users in the thread are clearly out for blood. Not getting terribly much resonance, though.
EDIT: Apparently OP has changed the “accepted answer” to one of the worst comments in the thread. SMH. Comments proceed to tell OP they’re confusing friendship scenes for romance ones.
And that’s like one thread in pages upon pages of threads. People predictably talk about general gameplay stuff (The Gale thread can actually be considered a gameplay question), mechanics, bugs, the usual.
Bonus: A thread on Musk wanting to buy Hasbro for D&D. Now there’s plenty of stuff D&D players have to say and criticise about Hasbro, them having clear language about the misogyny etc. in the first edition is not among it. Licensing terms are a thing which can get the community riled up, but the “backlash” against inclusivity is, as usual, manufactured, and from what I see the thread is mostly Musk bashing. Thinking of, Shaun recently published a video on the manufactured outrage around Stellar Blade.
Oh, the average age thing. Yeah don’t go to the LoL forums or whatever though without checking I expect them to be full of talk about the current meta. And people unironically using “gay” as an insult in <currentyear>, presumably because they’re too young to even know their sexual orientation.
Overall trying to portray steam like some kind of second kiwifarms falls flat on its face for a very simple reason: Even if (and I don’t think that’s the case) there would be no moderation at all, the majority of users on steam will be talking game mechanics, about bugs, because they’re there to play a game and the reason you find yourself interacting on those forums is because you have something to say, or ask, about the game. That kind of talk will always drown out the angry goblins.
I guess you wouldn’t see it as extremist, either, if you were one of the peeps getting fussy about a black woman in a video game…
“It’s okay that it’s a racist, sexist shithole full of threats of violence because I, personally have never seen that so it must not exist. Additionally, as I personally have never seen it, you must have a ridiculous view of what extremism might be… in spite of a US senate report that goes directly against my point.”
For the people downvoting me: https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/02-revised-gaming-report-steam.pdf
That’s all valid as saying to the US is “a racist, sexist shithole full of threats of violence” because those things exist somewhere in the US.
I guess Lemmy is too by that metric and you’re still here.
Same with literally any country I guess.
The important thing to me is the ratio between relevant, quality content and hateful crap. For me, Steam has a lot of high quality stuff and not a ton of hateful crap, meaning if you don’t go looking for it, you probably won’t see much. I mostly stick to game reviews and guides, and I can quickly skim over it and find what’s relevant.
There are plenty of sites where hateful crap is everywhere, and I avoid those. I’m honestly okay with skimming over the bad on an otherwise good site, because that’s just how I’ve grown to interact with the internet. I’d rather do that than have an overly censored internet.
deleted by creator
You’ve never seen a Pepe meme on Steam? I’m not kidding there either - if you dig into that ADL link and follow it to the research, they have a list of top extremist and hateful symbols on Steam and the swastika is number 2 at 9 percent of detected symbols. #1, representing something like 55% of extremist and hateful symbols their automated detector found on Steam was Pepe.
If you dig into their research, it’s mostly private user groups and profiles. Game discussion pages are moderated by their respective devs or whoever the devs appoint but user groups are moderated by their owner/appointees and user profile pages aren’t really moderated at all unless you’re doing something actually illegal in the US.
So unless you go looking at the user profile pages of white supremacists, or go searching for white supremacist user groups you won’t run into much of it.
Yeah, that is my point. How can people be radicalized by something they don’t see?
Also, as non American, I find it mental that pepe memes are considered hate symbols now.
If you have Nazis in the place they just wait until they see someone expressing opinions that’s bordering on their side of the political fence and they initiate contact to try and comfort them in their thoughts.
How to radicalize a normie: https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g
So, any platform that offers unmoderated DMs should be banned? Or how exactly do you want to solve extremists reaching out in private?
Who said anything about DMs? Make extremists feel unwelcome (contrary to what’s going on on Steam’s forums) and they’ll leave, you don’t need to scan DMs, you just need to delete extremist content instead of leaving it up like is happening now.
Wait, so your point is that we don’t need to moderate DMs (and by proxy other spaces that users don’t see), just make them feel unwelcome in the public ones.
And earlier in the thread, when I ask where the extremist content is, I and Schadrach agreed it is mostly places people don’t see. Which you didn’t object to.
So isn’t it job well done, Steam is as is should be? Or what is the issue here?
The implication is that someone is going to come off as a likely mark and for example get invited into a private user group with people “joking” with things like the Happy Merchant or being ridiculously over the top in a way that’s hard to take seriously to ease people in to taking white supremacist ideas seriously.
Ever seen the South Park episode about the Passion of the Christ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_the_Jew)? The idea is basically that that is constantly happening online anywhere it’s not sufficiently prevented.
Pepe isn’t hate speech. It was re-co opted by the creator and I often see it in queer friendly gamer spaces. If your threshold for hate speech is a cartoon frog, you may need to recalibrate. Most people do not see it as such and do not use it as such.
The ADL considers Pepe a hate symbol, which I agree with is daft but that’s kind of key to their data and they are considered experts in the field by most. They scanned Steam with some automated tool looking for hate symbol images, came up with like a million hate symbols detected. If something contained more than one detected hate symbol, it got counted as however many hate symbols the tool detected (so for example Pepe saluting a swastika would count as a Pepe and a swastika).
Almost 55% of those were Pepe. The next highest was the swastika at 9%. A literal majority of hate symbols they detected with that tool were Pepes, at more than 5 times the rate of the next most common symbol. It’s literally included to make the problem bigger in the hopes that most readers either won’t look that deep or won’t know what Pepe is.
EDIT: Another fun one is if you go look at their hate symbol index, about an eighth of two digit numbers are either hate symbols or part of a hate symbol.
Well, Pepe is a popular meme format among gamers, so it makes sense that the hateful subset of gamers would also use it. That doesn’t mean Pepe is hate speech, it just means people use it for hate speech.
The ADL still does for whatever reason
They aren’t the sole authority on the topic.
Clearly, but the articles floating around recently do treat them as the sole authority.
Then ignore those articles.
Just because the creator doesn’t want it used as a hate symbol doesn’t automatically mean it isn’t used as one, and next to chan-level garbage is the grand total of where I’ve seen Pepe.
Sounds like you need to hang out on better parts of the internet.
Uh huh, uh huh.
Meanwhile, here on earth, Matt Furie’s own lawyer brought up the fact that, on Steam, Pepe emotes were being used “in connection with hateful speech.”
Tell me something, has that changed, or is it possible, just maybe, that the Steam Community is one of those places I was referring to?
So now tell me this, when you claim that it’s ridiculous to treat Pepe use as a sign of hate on Steam Community, are you ignoring the active, proven and admitted use alongside hate speech, or are you trying to downplay it?
Matt Furie protecting his copyright as part of the re-co opt efforts? That doesn’t conflict with what I have said.
Unlike the swastika, someone owns the copyright and can make moves to reclaim it.
I love it when people respond to exactly one line and ignore the rest of my comment. Totally not a bad faith argument at all. Totally not exactly the same shit Reddit bigots always did.
All you need to do is join a Rust server and then look at some profiles.
Or don’t. Rust is famously toxic, so why do that to yourself?
If you only check the forums for technical questions then you’ll dodge it, if you look at the non tech sections for certain games (with diversity or ambiguous message like Hell Divers) then it’s something else.
Care to provide a link? I just skimmed Helldivers 2 discussions a bit and found nothing extremist.
Edit: The worst I found so far is this, which is pretty dumb but not really at the level of “dangerous”, or where it obviously needed to be removed.
Devs and publishers are mods of their forums, if it’s too much for them they can add community mods or lock their forums (like some do).
And ultimately they’re still Valve’s responsibility. If you provide a platform, you’re responsible for what people do on it.
Actually this is the purpose of section 230, to remove the responsibility of the provider in terms of content. The steam discussion forums would be a form of social media and therefore steam as a whole under at least US law would not be responsible for the content that’s posted on it.
Please note that this doesn’t mean that they can’t moderate their forums, section 230 does allow the owner of the platform to dictate what they want on the forums as long as they’re acting in good faith.
In my opinion section 230 is healthy for an environment, because it’s primary purpose was to prevent an individual from being able to sue the company as a whole for Content that someone else posted, which in my opinion is fair. If someone produced libel against someone, that’s something they need to handle with the person who posted it. It doesn’t make logical sense for the person to go after the platform that held the content as they wern’t involved in that process.
Valve also does business outside the US. American law doesn’t clear them of their legal obligations in other countries. And besides, legality and morality are not always the same. Providing a platform for hate speech is supporting hate speech, and as far as I’m concerned that’s unethical regardless of whether or not it’s legal.
I don’t think it’s moral to be able to sue a third party for something that another user did though. Like I definitely agree they should have some sort of reporting system active which they do, but it’s not ethical to sue someone who isn’t involved for Content that someone else did.
Let’s look at it from a hypothetical scenario. you’ve decided you want to run a lemonade stand, you become popular everyone in the neighborhood comes to visit your stand. Your town unfortunately has a quite racist sector, knowing this you have put up signs saying please be respectful , we hold the right to refuse service to anyone, and not surprisingly this group decided to come visit as well, a fight breaks out between that section and another group that’s attending your stand. People are hospitalized, instead of them suing the people who caused the injury they’re now suing your lemonade stand because you never stopped people of that group from showing up in the first place.
This is comparable, steam provided the environment to allow for the posting(the stand), they provided a terms of service / guideline of usage for the platform(the signs), they provided a reporting system to be able to report the misconduct to get people banned by both forum mods and official mods(the right to refuse service), people ignored the last two systems and did it anyway, and now people are saying that they should be responsible for people ignoring the rules and doing it anyway.
Ethically, they have done enough that the system practical and should work, if people use the tools that are provided
Morally they are not responsible at all since they’re in independent third party they only provide the infrastructure and they have put practices in place to help avoid a situation like that happening, while also abiding by US federal laws which is where steam is HQ’d
Oh for the love of fuck. Americans. Your country isn’t the centre of the universe. It doesn’t matter where a company’s headquarters are. If you are doing business in, for example, Germany, you have to abide by German laws. Being American isn’t an excuse and it doesn’t shield you from consequences for breaking the law.
Also, the big issue is that Valve isn’t actually using their right to refuse service. People can spread all sorts of bigotry via Steam’s discussions and groups without Valve acting on it. They’re providing a platform for hate speech and that is inherently immoral, regardless of what the law says.
I wanted to preface by saying you are the one juxtaposing the American centralization. I clearly specified US in my post to avoid the confusion of different country laws. Obviously each country has its own laws regarding it but, I’m using the US as a default, as it is a US based company. When it gets into other countries it gets sticky, obviously they need to follow other countries laws to operate, but only so much can be done. Thankfully most countries either have an equivalent to section 230, or rely on a takedown style system (including Germany), which absolves responsibility as long as it’s taken down when reported.
As for whether or not steam is using the right to refuse service, they do, but they do so when it’s reported(they even specify that in their TOS). Their content moderation system is very passive, I don’t believe the ADLs report at all because of the faulty data set it uses such as the ideology that since pepe was linked to some hate posts it can be used as a hate post detector, then directly contradicting themselves by saying that they acknowledge that Pepe is not a hate symbol in most uses and that you have to be aware of the situation.
Reading the ADL report, there’s a lot of it that I agree steam could do, but there’s things that ADL is just falsely seeing as wrong. Such as their claim they have no policy prohibiting hate and extremist groups (incorrect it’s in their main TOS) for example.
They state that steam is not doing enough for detecting the stuff, then proceed to give examples of exactly how steam is doing to protect against, such as having a Content report system, having content filters which are very clearly blocking hate and terrorist symbols, then they complained at the fact that steam had the audacity of giving the user the choice to turn off the moderation system, which is a client side setting.
Additionally I noticed they never tried to report anything, A quick Google search of other news companies reporting on the issue explains why I found. Because when it’s reported steam actually takes it down. The system works as intended, it’s just nobody in those groups want to report the group, and others haven’t bothered it seems.
Personally though, I have never not had someone who had clear hate or a terrorist symbols in their name not get banned within a day or two of reporting them. It’s only happend a handful of times, and usually it’s regarding a clear bullying case, but they almost always at the very least get community banned.
This is what manufacturing consent looks like. This increasing barrage of news about a topic, most of which is based on nuggets of truth but stretched so thin you can see your hand on the other side. The idea is to make you believe something needs to be done just with the sheer volume of time spent talking about something.
The reality is that the ADL is a Zionist front that is full of shit even on their best day, and they want control over Valve the same way they have the CEOs or owners of Reddit, Meta, and even smaller players like Bumble under their thumb. You watch, they will pressure the government to act and then when the squeeze is coming, offer Valve an easy out by joining their special advisory board on tech.
So instead we should let racists, misogynists and lgbtphobes make people believe that something needs to be done to protect white men from oppression?
What are you even talking about?
You’re saying that calling for something to be done on one side (censorship) is manufacturing consent, well so is letting extremists spread their message that something needs to be done about white men oppression.
No I’m saying the entire premise is bullshit. You’re talking about a conversation that isn’t even taking place and I’m saying the ADL is trying to convince you it is because it benefits them if you believe it.
What? The conversation has been about Valve being criticized for the lack of moderation on their forums for a while now, keep up buddy! You’re saying that it’s a bad thing to push for censorship, I’m saying it’s just as bad to let some fucking Nazi spread hate on their forums.
Of course! Big government needs to save us from our 1st amendment rights. Thanks so much. I don’t think I’d have figured it out without your help.
1st amendment applies to public spaces, not a forum owned by a private company.
The 1st is there so the government doesn’t step in and create laws prohibiting speech. It’s there to stop the gov from stifling free speech. It’s not there to give you a location to use free speech.
if it’s the government that is doing the censoring, against the will of both the users and the private company, how does it not apply here then?
Where’s that censorship? Show me, please!
“You’ll be under more scrutiny”
Ok, perfect, in the end they can’t actually do shit but reprimand then because it’s a private platform. Hell, have they censored Twitter or 4chan? Nope.
There is an implicit threat of government censorship there, even if it is ultimately toothless. And since valve is clearly not the one interested in increasing moderation, your point about the 1st amendment “not applying to private forums” is irrelevant
Seems to me it’s quite public because anyone can access their space by simply creating a free account. You’ve seemingly equated the letter of the law to the spirit.
edit: What the above poster isn’t legally understanding is quasi-public spaces. Ethically, they’re simply failing entirely.
That’s not the definition of the word public in this context. The sidewalk is public space, a shopping mall is private space, one is managed by the State, the other by a private corporation. Go and do Nazi salutes in a shopping mall and sue them when security throws you out and you’ll understand the difference.
There you go again with the letter over the spirit. You’d have us replace judges with computers.
They mall doesn’t have to tresspass a person that’s doing Nazi salutes. If you’d the faintest concept of the ideology of justice as implemented in the US you’d understand the difference.
I’m explaining how the first amendment works to you, that’s all. Freedom of speech doesn’t apply in spaces owned by private corporations, they can limit your speech in any way shape or form they want as long as you’re on their turf.
You keep explaining the letter of the law, poorly, to someone that understands both the law and justice system much better than yourself.
Don’t think you do buddy! Do you think you can sue a shop owner if they throw you out because you’re saying things they don’t like?
If you know so much about the first amendment and it doesn’t apply to Internet forums and platforms, how come you’re not rich from suing Twitter or something?