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.
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.
Imagine taking the ADL seriously.
Imagine using ad hominem to dismiss factual and easily verifiable points.
NataliePortman.gif: to remove them, right?
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.
I have it all censored and replaced by hearts.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
i mean if Roblox is any indication, Valve will probably bend the knee sooner or later. government scrutiny is obliging them to make changes and actually do even basic moderation over there:
The fast-growing children’s gaming platform Roblox is to hand parents greater oversight of their children’s activity and restrict the youngest users from the more violent, crude and scary content after warnings about child grooming, exploitation and sharing of indecent images.
The moves comes after a short-seller last month alleged it had found child sexual abuse content, sex games, violent content and abusive speech on the site. In the UK, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, told parliament: “I expect that company to do better in protecting service users, particularly children.”
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.
I have a steam account. I write like half a review and maybe a handful of comments a year, talking mechanics. The amount of people who don’t even lurk because they are there to play games has to be absolutely overwhelming.
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.”
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 was used as the mascot for all sorts of content on Reddits “the_donald”
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 was and always has been a neutral meme figure. And I’m not going to let some fking nazis take my meme frog!
Pepe was a neutral meme. He is not anymore.
https://beehaw.org/comment/4105872
The sad reality is that he is a politicized figuredhead for fascism. You can try and use him, but you need to be aware of how others use him, and it will end up reflecting more poorly on you than it will help reclaiming him.
I suggest looking the links on my comment linked, but at the very least on your own look up, “Pepe meme Putin”, and “was Pepe at January 6th”. People are using him to storm the capitol and dressing him up in an iron cross to assassinate political figures. That’s not just casual memes :(
I say this as someone who grew up with his era of memes (my first memes were icanhazcheezeburger which was the precursor to RageFu). I remember his good days too man.
But Pepe got Alex Jonesed. He got assaulted by the MAGA cult and they put him on a cross like Jesus and now he’s dying for their sins. I don’t think we can save him.
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.
Removed by mod
It’s not the games they’re talking about.
Consider reading the article.
RTFA before replying
