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From the article
“There’s an aspect of irony to the complaint: Elon Musk turned Twitter into a haven for racism and far-right rhetoric, after all, and he’s being rewarded with a high seat in the incoming US government.”
So is Texas. What are we gonna do about that?
Right. Nothing. Politicians are done governing and simply want to rule now.
So you sent the same letter to Musk, right? Right?
Removed by mod
What are they referring to here exactly? Multiplayer games? Steam friends’ list? I have never at any point ever experienced extremist content on Steam; I use it as a convenient location to buy games. It’s a retail shop, not a social media site.
Click on the community tab. There’s forums and shit there. There’s a shit ton of blatant racist shit, including people using highly offensive slurs and ascii art swastikas and stuff. It’s fucking disgusting.
I don’t even touch steam community because all it is is swastikas and Nazis. You’d think it’s the Odysee or Rumble or Twitter of gaming at that point
Damn, I never looked and now i don’t wanna.
It happens in games that have chat as well, mostly shooter games like CS2 and TF2. Consider yourself lucky if you haven’t encountered people like that, they’re not hard to miss unfortunately in those games.
I’ve never clicked on this, and I have no desire to do so. Why does Steam even have a community tab? When I go on Amazon and purchase a spool of Cat6, I’m not in the slightest bit interested in Amazon community about networking. I just want the shit I paid for in a semi-reasonable time. If I buy a game on Steam, I just want to receive and enjoy the product I paid for. If I want to talk about it with other people, I’ll come to Lemmy.
The Steam community stuff existed well before Lemmy, or even Reddit as far as I can remember. As toxic as it can be, it can also be helpful. The forums are broken down per game, I’ve found answers to getting games working on ultrawide monitors and stuff before, and fixes for other random game-specific issues.
There’s also the steam workshop, as well as the marketplace, I guess you’ve never seen the +rep stuff commented on people’s profiles?
I get what you’re saying, I think every time I’ve landed on a steam community post it’s been from a search page in my browser, never going there directly on Steam lol. You not using it is a completely valid thing, but it exists and it shouldn’t be filled with hate speech and neo nazi bullshit.
Side note, I used to volunteer as a sysadmin, maintaining a Hell Let Loose server for a clan, and wound up running double duty as an in-game admin for them also. The amount of times I’d have to look up somebody’s steam profile because they dropped some suss shit in text chat, only to find full on WW2 nazi shit in their usernames, profile pictures, about section, or groups they were members of was astronomical. It was an everyday occurrence. I get that a “realistic” (used to be, rip) WW2 shooter is going to self-select those people to a certain degree, but after seeing how many people were willing to just put that pathetic bullshit on display in their public profile I wasn’t surprised by this headline at all.
I reported every profile like that I came across, and I almost never got a “user does not exist” page indicating they had been banned when I followed up. The profile was usually just turned to private, and rarely left public but sanitized.
There are a lot of issues with New Vegas that I never would have been able to solve without the community section. It’s got good reason to be there.
Questions, and mostly
I recently started playing some games and I was called slurs in the in-game chat, also by people on my friends list because I’m a girl now, and they knew me as a boy (Yay, transphobia /s).
Extremist as defined by who? Valve lets the customer decide what is too extreme for them, which is how it should be.
I’ve seen people outright call for the extermination of minorities in forums. I think everybody can agree that’s pretty heinous. I don’t get to decide if that’s present or not except that I can report it. It’s not just things that can be misinterpreted, there’s a real problem.
As defined by Anti Defamation League, an Israeli lobbying group, based on their study on the use of language and emoji around steam forum, and the highest offensive emoji used count is…pepe.
Second is swastika.
Here’s the infograph:
Sad that pepe is still on these lists after all the efforts to take it back.
Once you get into the realm of terrorism, threatening real world harm, calling for violence against minorities. It’s no longer subjective, it’s considered extremist and dangerous. In other words, your rights end where others’ begin.
Extremist as defined by who? Valve lets the customer decide what is too extreme for them, which is how it should be.
I think is best also in your interest, as consumer (and human being, if you aren’t Zuckeberg or Bezos) if companies are called accountable for the crap they spread just to make investor happy.
You may like Valve for their way of business, but the law doesn’t work per persona: what it allow is a allowed to everyone (generally and depending if you’re in a theocracy, oligarcy etc.)
No the way the law works is that distributors are not liable for what happens on their platforms by default, otherwise literally any kind of social media would be illegal/impossible unless we hired 6 billion people to moderate the other 2 billion. However if you curate the content you show to the user then you do become liable for that content (again this is the law not just my opinion).
Valve as far as I know do not curate forum content, its just there and you can sort it by date. Facebook and Twitter on the other hand do have algorithms curating their content which does make them legally responsible for that content, especially since their algorithms seem to actually promote extremist content.
There are companies that can operate control by using the money they get from billion of customers, and other companies that prefer to use the money the take from billion of customers to teach citizens how unfair the governments are.
Those who are manipulated in favor of big corps are generally poorly educated individuals, so you can have huge number of that people, which translate in both social, economical and political power.
The point is not Valve, which me or you can respect and enjoy as company, the problem is that laws affect everyone. If the laws favor predatory companies, Valve has either adapt to be predator or being extinguished.
“human being, …aren’t Zuckerberg or Bezos” These are the same.
That doesn’t answer the question. This isn’t a hypothetical. Some organization or person has called Steam extremist. Who? What short sighted individual can’t understand a market place? I need to know so I can more efficiently mock then for what is obviously politics and business being mad at success.
Silence, Fed.
EDIT The ADL is a joke. Since they called Pepe a hate symbol. It’s just an meme.
Good thing memes can’t be racist and dog whistles don’t exist /s. Not every instance of pepe is, and the ADL admits that (whether or not you agree with them), but the original creator has sued organizations for using it as a hate symbol. Sorry the world is more complex than you think it is.
