- cross-posted to:
- steam@lemmy.world
- games@lemmy.world
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- steam@lemmy.world
- games@lemmy.world
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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Kinda stretching it aren’t they?
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!
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.
Korrekt!
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
The counter-clockwise one would have been the more fitting nazi symbol for Night and the Goddess of Death. Had to think about “Are we the baddies”
Yeah, I’m very much in the camp of “fuck you, you don’t get to have it” when it comes to extremist groups trying to co-opt other symbols.
It’s extremely doable–the LGBT population has largely succeeded at doing exactly that with “queer”, for example–these days, basically nobody utters that word as a pejorative. Fuck you, it’s ours now. See what I mean?
There are way more of us than them, we could literally do this for everything these dipshits try to ‘claim’.
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Wasn’t it co-opted by racists around 2016 or something? They also took the “OK” finger gesture from the circle game, the fuckers.
They did, but I don’t think they still have them.
Pepe is now (or again) a beloved element of Twitch chat, and the OK symbol… I dunno, that was eight years ago. I just don’t hear anybody talking about it, unless it’s to half remember that it’s bad now or something.
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
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.
That’s a really small sample size and small point of view, isn’t it?
Most anecdotes are.
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.
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
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
In my experience, people are, on average, extremely susceptible to this very basic logical fallacy, and truly believe the two sentiments above are equivalent. In other words, believing that “most X are Y” implies “most Y are X”.
It’s fucking everywhere, pervasive all over the political spectrum too, it’s universal. Radical feminists use the fact that most physical assailants are male to malign half of the human population. Racists use statistics about what percentage of violent crime is committed by a race, to draw conclusions about what percentage of that race commits violent crime. Hell, Reefer Madness, a propaganda piece with a well-deserved reputation of being completely full of shit, rests its premise on the exact same fallacy: “practically everyone dying from hard drug use is/was also a weed smoker, so we’ve concluded weed use leads to hard drug use”.
I see it over, and over, and over again, online and in real life. It makes you want to grab someone by the shoulders and shake them while yelling “all oranges are fruits, does that mean all fruits are oranges?!”, lol.
That’s enough venting for tonight, though, haha.
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.
I enjoyed the Vikings tv series, particularly the early seasons with Ragnar. I especially liked when they wove in religion and mysticism into the episodes. A lot of people enjoyed the series at the time, it was objectively popular. Having an interest in something well represented in popular culture does not make you a de facto racist bigot.
There’s a more likely argument to make, that within the population of white nationalist racist bigots, there’s an overrepresentation of interest/obsession with Vikings/Odinism.
Google says Steam has 132 million monthly active users. Even if you count Pepe (which is absurd, the vast majority of use of it has nothing to do with anything hateful), that’s still far under 1% of users.
But that number would belittle the fake outrage and the side payments would stop.
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?
Palistine? Really?
Why do mods hate Hindus???
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.
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Oh fuck off. The US is an unsafe place, not Steam.
Both
Edit: I didn’t know this community is so reactive, someone replied how is it controversial? Simply glancing through the article, anyone would know it’s talking about the comments and forums pasting swastikas and other extremist shit. This isn’t normal in other social media.
Explain Steam being unsafe? It’s a marketplace. Developers make controversial content.
Have you seen any steam forum pages?
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.
I was going to add, as a user of both Steam and YouTube, I have seen far worse stuff in YouTube comments than I ever have on a Steam forum.
I think part of this comes down to the fact that disgusting, hateful comments will pop up on almost any YouTube video in the comment section, but you actually have to navigate to Steam forums with this content.
So, YouTube comments are thrown in your face and hard to not see, as they are right below the video, but Steam forum comments are at least hidden behind a few layers of clicks.
I agree that singling out Steam as if it’s the main problem, isn’t going to fix anything, at all.
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.
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?
Every company everywhere is doing that. There are ways to limit things and be okay with it.
If companies using your data and pushing gambling bothers you, go live off the grid.
If companies using your data and pushing gambling bothers you, go live off the grid.
No, you get your ass off lemmy
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.
You guys can’t even keep nazis out of government. Why should it be steams responsibility to keep them from playing a game?
That’s the whole point. Sure there’s Nazis in the government but look over there, a Nazi! Look over there a Nazi! It’s Nazis from top to bottom. Wanna let us censor the Internet to stop them? No? You’re a Nazi sympathiser then.
Where? Where at tho? I’ve been using steam and playing valve games for like 16 years or something like that and I don’t see it anywhere. Maybe the one troll in user made guides but that usually goes away just like any other platform
Short version is that for the most part forum moderation for each game is left up to the devs or whoever they appoint, and users can create user groups and curators without much if any restrictions and they don’t particularly give a shit what content the game you want to sell has. The only real exceptions are if it’s illegal in the US, which applies to very little (for example no CSAM).
I find it interesting that the federal government threatening a private entity with legal repercussions if it doesn’t restrict the speech of it’s users isn’t such an obvious violation of the first amendment that lawyers aren’t climbing over each other to fight this one.
And if you don’t see the problem with it, imagine we agree that the federal government should be allowed to restrict what expression can go on on internet platforms content-wise, then imagine Trump and his cronies deciding where the borders lie. They already want to revive the Comstock Act.
Welcome to Commiefornia
The Comstock Act was created by a right wing Christian puritan, and has been fought against by leftists, and supported by conservatives, throughout it’s history. But commies are to blame, sure.
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.
Thank you for linking this.
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
Wow this push against Valve kind of popped up quickly and suddenly didn’t it?
Honestly it’s about fucking time. The unmoderated hate speech on their platform has gone on long enough. Many people don’t realize just how bad it is but I recently hopped on some servers and I got called “tranny” and “groomer” because people knew me and they knew I “used to be a boy” (not true, I never was a boy, just in-denial). I’ve also seen people pushing Nazi shit on Steam community discussions and in-game on official servers, it’s insanely bad.
You know were the ones wholl get censored and not the nazis though
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…
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Translation: Our corpo overlords don’t like that you can review bomb our shitty games and force us to take losses when we do shitty corpo things. Appease my bosses or they’ll make me be bottom again with no lube.
Yes, people say mean things on the internet. That’s never going away. Teach your children how to deal with it.
I don’t think that Nazi shit or promotion of terrorism falls under “mean things on the internet” that would be over-trivializing, and I do say that because I have indeed seen many people doing these things in my years on Steam, as well as encouraging violence towards me for being a girl and having “used to have been a boy” (being transgender).
are they “mean things” and are they on the internet? If so it’s mean things on the internet, this doesn’t mean it won’t cause IRL damage, but until it transitions from hateful words to actionable threats it’s just an occupational hazard of the internet.
Are you really sitting here trying to excuse nazism, death threats, and promotion of terrorism?
I won’t excuse death threats because those are generally targeted, and are explicitly illegal.
Nazism and promotion of terrorism are explicitly illegal in some places, while death threats are not explicitly illegal everywhere. So does your opinion on these flip flop depending on where you live?
How about grow a spine and get some morals of your own? Ones that are not dependent on whatever is legal where you are currently located.
If nazism and promotion of terrorism are fine with you, I don’t think you are going to find very many friends here.
the primary reason I’m fine with terrorism is related to how broadly it can be defined and how some people like to expand its definition to silence those they don’t like, same with naziism and how some like to associate anti israilism with nazism. the government should leave the regulations of speech up to the platform and treat them like public bulliton boards (freely accessible to everyone and barely regulated)
You know what’s terrorism, what I’m talking about when I say terrorism? Calling bomb threats on schools and hospitals because they support trans rights, talking about or encouraging people to do that. Shit like what LibsOfTiktok does is terrorism. These are the kinds of Terrorism you see on Steam, in forums, games, and live chats, awful shit that would not be considered acceptable by any decent person. It would be one thing if we were talking about nuanced takes discussing the war on Israel and people on Steam were being accused of antisemitism over “anti israilism” but that’s not what’s happening there. Most people on Steam discussing that are in fact being antisemitic, are in fact attacking Jewish people and Judaism, not the israeli government.
When someone points out terrorism on Steam they’re talking about the death threats and bomb threats, when they talk about Steam being racist and antisemitic they aren’t taking about anti-israel takes, they are talking about hatred towards jews and people of racial ethnicities. The situation here isn’t nuanced it is very much the clear cut 4chan shit.
You shouldn’t be excusing nazism and the disgusting harmful shit people like LibsOfTikTok do. Even if it isn’t explicityly illegal it still hurts people. Apologia for this shit isn’t okay or acceptable ever. You’re on a Trans friendly instance I can’t believe you’re sitting here trying to justify some types of online abuse.
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone Just curious, what do you have to say about this type of apologia towards Nazism and other forms of online abuse?
I’ve replied to the person in question.
Great to hear.
Edit: Downvote me all you want random angry losers, doesn’t change anything. I will continue to let admins know about assholes who violate their own homeserver’s rules. The fact that you hate it means I’m doing something right.
You may have picked the wrong instance then, because as the blahaj.zone instance admin, I actively remove “mean things”. Words designed to harm others, whether it’s bigotry, or harassment or insults, are not an “occupational hazard”, they undermine the community and hurt folk when they’re vulnerable.
Hateful words will get you banned here, and apologism for them and downplaying their impact is not welcome.
People need to understand that the internet is a public space. Family PCs should be in a shared space like the living room and kids need to have parental controls enabled on their smart phone. Beyond that, yeah people need to get thicker skins when it comes to social media (including steam in this).
Strong disagree on parental controls. As a parent, if I don’t trust my kids, they won’t get a device. Period. If I trust them, they will get a device without any limitations. Period.
I really don’t see the point in parental controls, all it does is encourage kids to learn how to get around parental controls. Instead of that, teach kids what it takes to earn your trust and go that route.
I’m a parent, and here are my only controls:
- Switch - passcode because my 4yo kept playing games when not allowed; I told the older kids the code, and will probably remove it soon
- my computers passwords - when my kids are allowed to play games or whatever, I’ll unlock it and tell them what they can and can’t use it for, with zero controls other than the underlying threat of losing privileges entirely if they misuse it
- tablet - each has a passcode, but the kids don’t use them much (only on trips)
- TV - again, 4yo kept watching when not allowed, and the older kids watched as well (but only when the 4yo did it), so they all lost access; will probably remove this soon
We do no internet filters, no enforced time limits (they have their own timers though), and no locks on specific programs. Either I trust them with everything or nothing. They know what they’re allowed to use, and they know the consequences.
I’m not convinced by your approach but I respect that you’ve put a lot of thought into it. I guess my main issue is that it seems some parents don’t think about it at all.
That’s completely fair. IMO, engaged parent > parental controls > absentee parent.
I owe my IT career to my parents trying to restrict my access with parental controls. I learned a lot figuring out how to circumvent those things and cover my tracks.
This is also how I became an Internet plumber.
Agree and using the same approach. Only limitation is purchases, they can’t spend money.
It never stops with parental control. Corps will use it for their own CYA policy as well, specifically age restricting everything
Yup, I actually refuse to allow them to play any games with MTX, at least for now (they’re still young). So Fortnite et al are outright banned in my house because I don’t want them getting used to that environment just yet. We’ll probably get there, but they’re haven’t yet learned how to manage money properly and defer gratification, and I don’t think the consequences of MTX are steep enough to properly teach that lesson. And this isn’t just for them, I ban myself as well, and I’d like to ban my wife, but she gets to make her own choices since she’s an adult.
I totally give them money they can spend on other things, and my older kid has absolutely learned that spending it all at once is a poor choice, but they’re still too impulsive for me to let them loose on predatory games.
Sticks and stones,. something something something…
Literally turning america entirely into an unsafe place then threatening others for it. Are they trying to do a government take over of a shiny appealing money maker? It sure seems like they actually want the nazis everywhere else, I bet if they actually do anything they will keep the nazis if they actually exist in the first place.
By “turning America into an unsafe place” do you mean to accuse the Democrats, one of which is behind this?
Not all democrats are progressives. It’s a big tent party.
I don’t think that even matters. There are plenty of people that would surely be best simply deleted regardless of their affiliation. The us needs a revolution at this point. canada isn’t even that far behind. our former liberal party in the last while changed their name, then just fused with the conservative party. so now we are also down to two parties plus a bunch of effectively useless riffraff.
ADL report
Opinion discarded. Those ADL fucks lie about damn near everything.
