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.
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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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 , 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.
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.
Ok, cool. How should Steam prevent it?
Edit: Or more relevantly, how is having unmoderated usually unseen public spaces worse for this than having unmoderated private spaces? Is the issue only that steam does not hide what is happening unlike other websites?
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 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.
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.
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.
Gish gallops don't work online. I only responded to the part with substance. The rest is subjective to personal perspective.
People are shitty online? Yeah, so shit. May want to focus on those private facebook groups or twitter first. Steam users can't maintain a boycott, but lets focus on that while facebook and twitter were involved with January 6th.
So it's no longer "Pepe isn't used by extremists on Steam," it's now "Pepe being used by extremists on Steam doesn't matter," huh?
Goalpost status: moved.
How does that saying go?
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.