- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- technology@lemmit.online
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On Jan. 3rd, this will switch to a Republican senator saying the same thing, but the “extremist content” will be “woke.”
OK, there, Tipper.
Once again, a clueless boomer blames games.
How about YouTube? Why aren’t we going after Google?
What about Twitter? Musk’s platform is filled with extremist hate.
Plenty of extremist diarrhea spewing from the mouth of a President Elect.
It’s almost like this kind of content on Steam is a symptom of a bigger problem.
Steam honestly has it really bad. You don’t see blatant hate speech in play store reviews but you certainly do on steam. The same goes for their forums, which are almost totally unmoderated. Totally agree tho that this is a symptom of a larger problem and am always wary of the government seeking to impede free speech, even if it’s speech I despise. If there are calls to violence and stuff I’m totally cool with that being prosecuted ofc.
Yes, agreed, it definitely needs moderation. But I don’t think it needs singling out (again, not saying don’t moderate).
The bigger picture is a proliferation of online extremist speech in general. And yes, Google may have done well to moderate play store reviews (anecdotally), but they certainly haven’t done well with YouTube.
But I would suggest that focusing on any one online forum / store / outlet / etc. will naturally miss an important trend, and the reasons for that trend should be understood – while concurrently doing everything possible to limit this kind of hate online.
Absolutely those platforms are a bigger problem, but your argument isn’t a very good one. Yes, we should go after those platforms. Yes, we should also go after Steam. Whataboutism never solved any problems.
I think you missed the first sentence of my comment. Games have been blamed above other media for years and years and years. That is not whataboutism.
Edit: or the last sentence for that matter.
It’s almost like this kind of content on Steam is a symptom of a bigger problem.
I never suggested that Steam doesn’t need improvement. There is extremist content being posted. But it is definitely part of a larger (frankly, much more obvious) problem. Calling attention to a root cause is just not whataboutism.
From another article talking about this:
For years, Sen. Warner, a former tech entrepreneur, has been raising the alarm about rise of hate-fueled content proliferating online, as well as the threat posed by domestic and foreign bad actors circulating disinformation. Recently, he pressed directly for action from Discord, another video game-based social networking site that is hosting violent predatory groups that coerce minors into self-harm and suicide. He has also called attention to the rise of pro-eating disorder content on AI platforms. A leader in the tech space, Sen. Warner has also lead the charge for broad Section 230 reform to allow social media companies to be held accountable for enabling cyber-stalking, harassment, and discrimination on their platforms.
The linked Section 230 Reform details
He’s targeting all kinds of social media, not just gaming platforms.
Then, good. I just hope they’re being tackled by order of affected users.
You literally said “what about” in your comment. You specifically argued that the problem lay elsewhere, and Steam is just a symptom. Attempting to absolve Steam of culpability in the problem because “games get blamed above other media” is absolutely whataboutism. It’s a bad argument.
You literally said “what about” in your comment.
Do you legitimately think that any use of the words “what about” makes something whataboutism?
You specifically argued that the problem lay elsewhere
Again, you seem to have missed the point of the comment. I did not deny that Steam needs improvement. Things can be symptoms of larger problems, and calling that out is not whataboutism (to the contrary, the purpose of whataboutism is to suggest that there is no problem with item X – not that item X is a symptom of item Y).
Edit: clarity
Do you legitimately think that any use of the words “what about” makes something whataboutism?
No, that’s not what makes it whataboutism. That’s just a funny bit of your comment. What makes it whataboutism is your continued insistence that the problematic behavior is sourced from elsewhere. That’s not how things work. The right-wing extremism on Steam isn’t a symptom of extremism elsewhere. It isn’t sourced from elsewhere. It’s there on Steam, because the source for it is the same on Steam as it is on Twitter, right-wing extremist users. Suggesting that it is derived from the other sites implies that Valve is less responsible for it than other sites, which doesn’t make any sense. Furthermore, your argument in your comment is based on your perception of victimhood of video games by other media, which isn’t relevant to the conversation at all.
And finally, the fact that Steam supposedly has, by your estimation and without any supporting evidence, less right-wing extremism than other sites doesn’t make the problem better or worse for Valve. It’s still a problem, and it’s one they have to deal with. Not twitter, not Facebook, and not anyone else.
your continued insistence that the problematic behavior is sourced from elsewhere
So you’re suggesting that Steam is the source of the extremist behavior we see across a broad spectrum of other media?
For someone literally arguing about argumentation, it sure is hard to see your point.
No, you just don’t seem to be understanding what I’m saying, or the point of the article linked. The source is the users, of course. What I’m saying is that they didn’t come from twitter. They’ve always been on Steam, just as they’ve always been on twitter or facebook.
And so, it logically follows that if you blame twitter for not dealing with users like that, then you must, by necessity, blame Valve for not dealing with them either.
I know the article addresses it but… What about X’ter? Head of Twatter now has an official government position while his shitty company allows Neo Nazi, hate, homophobic, and misogynist behavior runs rampant!
What a fucking farce…
Every accusation is a confession with fascists
Yeah let’s suggest these kids spending their time somewhere way safer like Matt Gaetz’s mansion.
Churches and other pedophile centers
Wow this push against Valve kind of popped up quickly and suddenly didn’t it?
Unsafe? Like is the game going to stab them?
It’s a great place to create extremists, there is basically no moderation and people say some fucking awful shit on Steam forums. I think this is a long time coming, honestly.
I just see people in the discussions forums talking about how to get all the achievements in Stellaris
You definitely aren’t looking very hard
If one has to look very hard to find it then it is not everywhere.
And that’s tea.
Frankly I’m shocked people don’t recognize how prevalent it is. So many game releases have discussion forums plagued with “anti-woke” bullshit plastered everywhere. I just write off the forums for any game that features a black or female main character, let alone LGBT representation.
I’m only looking when I’m very hard
Afaik, the discussion boards for individual games are not moderated by Valve staff (outside of their own titles and the general discussions not tied to any specific game), but by the developer of the game. And it pretty much is ignored by everyone outside of a few indie devs that either just believe in transparency and use the boards themselves, or because they have huge egos and act like little tyrants being the worst kind of Reddit/Discord mod. The only in-between is the automated systems that work off reports and filters.
Bingo.
It’s been that way since its inception, astronauts with gun meme or whatever.
Well, not really. There was a time when it was Valve staff and volunteer moderators under their direction. But that was before their discussion forums got integrated into Steam directly and there was a bajillion games on it.
Though I am confident they could actually hire people to handle it if they wanted to. Or were forced to. Steam makes a bit of profit, I’m sure.
You know, I think you are right.
I meant to say when the discussion forums were integrated and basically autogenerated for any game, when Steam went from ‘this is our game launcher’ to ‘soon we will sell every pc game that has ever and will ever exist.’
But when it comes to hiring people to moderate things?
Insanity.
Facebook does this by hiring tens, hundreds of thousands of moderators in economically undeveloped nations, managed by a few thousand based in the US or EU.
Its a horror show sweatshop of constant exposure to the most horrible content imaginable, which basically drives many employees to suicide or insanity.
There is no AI that can do this.
… Valve could maybe? probably? afford to hire hundreds of thousands of low cost moderators following Facebook’s model.
But I’m pretty sure that they would basically go, oh, we are now legally responsible for what is said on our platform?
Fuck it, nuke 99% of it from orbit, do a bit of redesign, hire a much smaller cadre of moderators, who will manage a vastly stripped down and more cumbersome and more restrictive ability to comment on or discuss things.
… What would be the downside to that?
12 year olds and morons with no impulse control now use discord instead of the steam forums?
People maybe go back to making their own game based community websites/forums?
… Who is going to stop using Steam because the discussion forums dissapear?
Because all the default comment posting and viewing settings for all the other ways you can leave a public message now flip to being restrictive and time delayed?
I really do stand by my other statement in this thread: You could erase everything that is not from a human, manually pinned discussion thread and nothing of value would be lost.
PCGamer really hates doing journalism mhm ? You have to figure out which link goes back to the actual article about the mentioned report, and then find which link directly goes to the report : https://www.adl.org/resources/report/steam-powered-hate-top-gaming-site-rife-extremism-antisemitism
The full report actually provides a lot more information and answers some legitimate questions, and other ignorant comments raised in here, there’s an entire appendix about their method and how they fine tuned an ai model to review 150+ million profile pictures / 600+ million comments
There’s also interesting info about the customization of Steam profile, which I don’t remember Steam publicly sharing :
At the time of data collection, Steam Community had 458.32 million users. Of these, 418.4 million were public profiles and 39.68 million were private profiles (even if a profile was private, there was certain related information that was publicly available).
Many of Steam Community’s 458.32 million users have not customized their accounts extensively. Only 7.4% of public profiles have a summary, Steam Community’s equivalent of a social media bio. 41.8% of profiles use Steam community’s default profile picture, making it the most common avatar on Steam, present on 191.2 million profiles.
Most Steam Community users are also not particularly active. One proxy for activity is player level, which users can increase by activities such as buying games or collecting trading cards while playing games on Steam. Among the 91.69% of Steam Community users who publicize their level, the average level is 2.8 and the median level is 0.0 (the maximum level observed was 5,001). Our detections should be interpreted with this context in mind.
SHIT TONS of smurf accounts for games like Dota, CSGO, and other stuff that I’d often see with no profile customization. Would make sense if tons of accounts are side accounts
Thank you for linking this.
As a long time Steam user, while I still really like Steam and think it’s the more consumer friendly platform, it has devolved greatly. Especially discussion forums are nearly no different than reddit toxicity where people exhibit their worst behaviors. I miss the legitimate discussions and love for specific games. Now it’s mostly complaining and complete disregard for developers being humans.
The flood of garbage games has also been fairly obvious over the last decade. Some filters on your account handle a lot of this at least for the adult ones, but not all of it. It reminds me of the Wii shovelware era, but far worse.
BUT I would remind the Senator they STILL don’t even have a fucking budget passed for this fiscal year we are already a month and a half into and they oughta stay in their lane and do their first basic god damn job before pointing at the supposed failures of others.
I don’t think anything good can come of the government deciding to crack down on Steam moderation in order to “save the children”.
The current situation of Steam having a toxic forum community in places is better than whatever happens with “scrutiny”.
If I may put on a tinfoil hat for a moment, this recent push to get Steam labeled as an extremist den that needs to be dealt with feels like yet another attack originating from competitors.
This isn’t the government cracking down, this is the senator writing a letter. There’s no force of government behind this. It’s simply someone in power bringing light to a problem. A problem that we all should acknowledge exists, because it’s very easy to verify.
This is a Senator firing an opening salvo with a vague threat of government action.
Warner also warned, somewhat ominously, that if Valve does not adopt industry-standard moderation practices—whatever that means—it will “face more intense scrutiny from the federal government for its complicity in allowing hate groups to congregate and engage in activities that undoubtedly puts Americans at risk.”
Nothing has been done with government force, yet. Maybe he will drop it, maybe he won’t, but at the moment I’m responding to a Senator floating the idea of using government power to wade into Steam forums.
I’m sure they’re able to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, if you want the government to work on only one thing at a time things will be even worse than they are.
Steam steal all your data and abduct kids into gambling and yet your main concern is reddit toxicity?
I suspect you fit that category of people who are really fun at parties
There’s no suspect you fit into the category of people that shitpost
So?
Kinda stretching it aren’t they?
They even admit that pepe can be used in perfectly normal ways, yet they show it’s the number one most used one. That’s crazy to me lmao
Pepe is a beloved internet meme, not a symbol of hate. Rightoid asshats need to leave pepe and doge the fuck alone. >:(
I thought it came from 4chan, but it actually comes from Myspace. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog
Wtf pepe is considered alt-right because alt-right uses them sometimes??? I hear they also use English! Maybe English needs to get banned!
Same shit happened to the swastika. It comes from Hinduism, still widely used there, in the West it also used to be a symbol of good luck before the 30’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
They didn’t just use it sometimes, they were using it as an intentional dog whistle, that is the difference. Part of dog whistling is choosing something that, otherwise, has had no real relationship to the thing it is being used as a dog whistle for.
so they can choose anything and we just have to stop using it because its their dogwhistle now?
No, but you have to understand that it now comes with the context of being a WP dog whistle. The symbolism of the Nazis weren’t anything to their ideology before hand. They had widespread use for thousands of years. Now they, especially the primary one, is all but verboten in the west, and people who use things, like the swastika, as religious symbols, even know to tread with caution using it in the west. White hoods, and robes, have been used in cultural/religious regalia forever. However, you don’t use them in the US unless you consider being mistaken for a klan memeber.
Can we reclaim pepe? Probably, it was minor compared to the aforementioned things, and the creator has done a lot to kibosh the commercial use of it from right wing people. However, it was that, and that context doesn’t just disappear because you don’t like it.
There’s a whole documentary about reclaiming pepe called “feels good man”
The more we discourage people from using pepe because WP and shitheads, the more they win.
what if they start using this as weapon to deny us things?
to me it’s kind of kind the nazi bar thing. if you’re at a bar with 2 Nazis, and you’re not a nazi, you’re still hanging out at a nazi bar.
they fucking adore this frog. no other group has embraced it as strongly or consistently. I’m quite happy to let an old ass meme die because i find it distasteful now that it’s the favorite meme of nazis.
Korrekt!
deleted by creator
Wasn’t it co-opted by racists around 2016 or something? They also took the “OK” finger gesture from the circle game, the fuckers.
Wait, is just using a Valknut considered a hate symbol? I was under the impression that it was a pretty common “I like Vikings/Odin/Paganism” type symbol… Same with Tyr tbh.
The issue is that the Venn diagram of people interested in vikings/odinism and racists bigots is almost just a circle
Not sure I believe that for a minute. There’s definitely a group there, nobody can deny that, but Norse mythology is incredibly popular among leftists too - I say this as somewhat of a Norse mythology leftist, whose favorite viking/odinist/pagan band preaches unity and kindness among all people and is fronted by a polyamorous bisexual - there’s a lot to love in the mythos and the factual history, and it appeals to a wide variety of people for a wide variety of reasons.
What band is that? I’m always interested in checking out new music.
This is hyperbole. A large amount of racists and bigots are into norse stuff? Maybe. Almost all people in the norse stuff are racists and bigots? High doubt, and shouldn’t be allowed to be coopted anyway. Loki is one of the few ancient figures with some gender fluid markings as it is.
You’re right, but 100% of the people I’ve encountered that were REALLY into Norse stuff specifically, rather than a general interest in history, were white supremacist.
I’m interested in Norse mythology for stories like the time Thor had to wear a dress to get back his hammer. I bet he looked hot in that dress.
That’s a really small sample size and small point of view, isn’t it?
Most anecdotes are.
This is fair. I am usually not in spaces where I’d see it much but have heard tell. Part of why I say it is to not have people feel shamed if they just generally like the culture/pop aesthetic involved without any baggage and to encourage people to do what they can to counter co-opt attempts
How is the PFLP a hate symbol LMAO
Moon Man? Like the old McDonald’s commercial? How the fuck is that a hateful or extremist symbol? Because anyone who remembers it must be extreme for burgers?
He got reused in the mid 2010s as a very racist meme where people would make him sing some truly heinous shit, actually
Defunctland (I think) did a video on Mac Tonight that mentions it in passing, if you’re curious open a private browsing window and look it up, you can likely find the memes still
卐 Lemmy is an unsafe place 卐
Til that the gate of the Auschwitz extermination camp is an extremist or hateful symbol.
I’m sorry that you had to find out this way.
Oh fuck off. The US is an unsafe place, not Steam.
Both
Explain Steam being unsafe? It’s a marketplace. Developers make controversial content.
Steam discussion forums on every game are a complete dumpster fire. Someone needs to do better, whether it is Steam themselves or moderators.
Steam discussion forums … kind of famously do not have or require any active, human moderation.
Basically, there’s a simple ‘foul word detector’, and that’s about it.
You could nuke everything that is not a manually pinned thread, and nothing of value would be lost.
they go after my hobbies and i will turn into extremist
They’re creating the one thing they want to destroy. lol
The nazis, or the government?
Old ass boomer fixating on games are evil I guess and finding it deserves more attention than places like Twitter and YouTube filled with influencers who have the captive audience of very susceptible individuals that they are molding them to their image. Maybe focus on the root cause.
