Senator Mark Warner’s letter follows an ADL report about extremist content on the platform.
US Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has sent a letter to Valve CEO Gabe Newell asking if the company intends to take measures to curtail extremist content on Steam. The letter references a report by the Anti-Defamation League that identified a large number of user accounts and user-created groups “that glorified antisemitic, Nazi, white supremacist, gender- and sexuality-based hate, and other extremist ideologies” on the PC gaming platform.
The letter features a high-level view of the kind of hateful content the ADL found on Steam. That includes “40,000 groups with names that included hateful words, with the most prominent being ‘1488,’ ‘shekel,’ and ‘white power’.”
Why is it Valve’s job to police game content? That’s a shitty precedent for any platform.
If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Whether it’s ultraviolent stuff like Postal or Hatred, ww2 games where you can play as literal Nazis, or the opposite side of the spectrum where you have LGBT centric content.
Bear with me, that previous sentence isn’t intended to equate those two things, but the reality is a lot of people find LGBT content objectionable. By putting the publish/not publish decision up to platform owners, you’re setting up a system that getting your game published is according to the political whims of whoever is in charge of that process. Any system you make here can easily be abused.
If you think banned books are dumb the same should apply to games. I for one appreciate knowing that freedom of expression is alive and well on Steam, and if I don’t want to engage with content I find objectionable, I simply don’t. Why is that such a foreign concept?
Should Valve be required to publish each and every game submitted? Even if they are absolute bare minimum shovelware garbage?
Valve decided a while ago that it was easier to just take the $100 and have some basic verification that a game runs rather than do any curation themselves.
If it’s not malicious software like a bitcoin miner or whatever, yes. If people want to buy shovelware, that’s between them and whoever made it.