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.
Curious what industry standard Senator Warner is judging Valve against because a social media site, which Warner is comparing Valve to, being filled with Nazis and the far right feels like the standard, even if some sites at better at quarantining them than others. Also, “intense scrutiny” from Congress is kind of an empty threat at the best of times, but especially when Congress is about to be run by the sort of people who aren’t going to see this as a problem.
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.
They can’t do this to peepo, not my boy! 😥
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.
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.
The Pepe doesn’t quite have the same significance and weight yet. It’s not too late. Make leftist Pepes. Drown their identifiers in false positives until they become useless.
Well I have to say, off the bat, it needs to be not just leftist/marxist. It would need to have large non offensive use in general discourse.
Again my example of pepe for general discord moderation. It’s not trolls that show up in say political discussion groups. It’s trolls that show up in random game discords or other non-pollitical locations. IE as a moderator I’d also be auto banning someone bringing up random arguements on how we need wealth re-distribution, not because I disagree with them, but because people are just there to talk about a game, and not have political arguement.
and in short that’s generally the thing, IMO Pepe isn’t… really that overwhelmingly good of a meme where it’s just a universal funny to outside groups. But the alt right is the only ones bringing it into more general average Joe locations, along with their hateful rhetoric.
In short for pepe to be recovered it needs… major mainstream Apolitical usage, which quite frankly I don’t see often.
Yeah, and Chaplin had the mustache first!
A signal is less useful the more “false” signals (i.e. noise) pollute the medium it’s transferred over.
If we can make it clear that “their” memes aren’t actually just theirs by “re-appropriating” them and abuse whatever secret identification dogwhistles they want to use, we can drown their signals in noise.
Posting Pepes for non-nazi purposes is an act of resistance.
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.
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Omg this is such a helpful comment! Good job! <3
Yeah I mean, idk what happened there. Brain wasn’t computing well I guess.
But for real I really don’t know. I’ve noticed that happens with me sometimes where I’ll repeat phrases in a single post
All good. Looks like my comment got axed for some reason, even though I’ve intended it as a positive critique.
I’ve noticed that people like using “I mean” as a filler or figure of speech. But when you keep seeing it over and over again, especially multiple times in a single comment, or in a comment chain, it’s really noticable.
I used to say “uhm” out loud a lot while forming sentences. It’s a placeholder to give your mind a pause to catch up what you are trying to say. A speech therapist highlighted this to me and got me to slowly phase it out by first squelching it and just internalizing the “uhm”, then completely getting rid of it and rely on silent pauses instead. It helped me realize these speechpatterns, doesn’t matter whether they are used as a run on or a pause. And “I mean” really caught on the past few years as a faux intellectual discourse marker, so it’s extra noticable for me.
Looks like there’s some more about its usage here:
Yeah “uhms” and the dreaded “like” are also an issue for me too. I would like to eliminate it from my vocabulary entirely. I make videos and live stream, and I notice it a lot when I watch playback. It’s pretty terrible. Did you have a hard time ridding them from your speech? I should try fixing that.
No, it was rather easy. I was only eleven years old though. The consciousness of it and the method to squelch it at first, without saying it out loud, helped a lot. The therapist really only highlighted it once for me. But it didn’t help that to get to this point I got traumatized by a whole class of vicious fifth graders laughing at me while I was reciting something in front of the class. 🙄
Damn yeah that’ll do it. Kids can be ruthless!
Whataboutism to avoid the conversation talking about Twitter
Why would a gaming news website talk about twitter? How is it whataboutism? Two things can be bad at the same time.
Not the gaming site article. The senator themselves
So he could ask Valve who, if the fanboys are to be believed, might actually do something about it, or go ask Elon to fix Twitter who will certainly not
Oh, got ya
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.
Imagine taking the ADL seriously.
Imagine using ad hominem to dismiss factual and easily verifiable points.
What’s your problem with ADL? I’m not very familiar with them.
Whatever the result in, I wish there won’t be over-moderation that too Western-centric.
Not all swastika are Nazi (I live in a country where swastika is simply symbol of religion and peacefulness). Not all words that too similar with offending word in English are bad (some games literally banned Indonesian for having “nasi goreng” as their name, too similiar with Nazi they said.)
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”
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.
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.
I have it all censored and replaced by hearts.
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It’s not the games they’re talking about.
Consider reading the article.
RTFA before replying
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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)?
