Comment by Ogmios@sh.itjust.works on Itch.io games site taken down

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.

There’s been an aggressive push against gaming recently. Check all the recent Steam news.

I haven’t seen anything like that. What steam news specifically are you referring to?

It’s it anti video games to point out something that is actually happening? Just because you love the company doesn’t mean that any bad news is an attack against the industry. Valve doesn’t want to moderate their forums, it was bound to happen.

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 am a big GOG enjoyer myself, but when I need to use steam for anything, I have never encountered such content.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All you need to do is join a Rust server and then look at some profiles.

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.

Valve doesn’t want to moderate their forums

Devs and publishers are mods of their forums, if it’s too much for them they can add community mods or lock their forums (like some do).

And ultimately they’re still Valve’s responsibility. If you provide a platform, you’re responsible for what people do on it.

Actually this is the purpose of section 230, to remove the responsibility of the provider in terms of content. The steam discussion forums would be a form of social media and therefore steam as a whole under at least US law would not be responsible for the content that’s posted on it.

Please note that this doesn’t mean that they can’t moderate their forums, section 230 does allow the owner of the platform to dictate what they want on the forums as long as they’re acting in good faith.

In my opinion section 230 is healthy for an environment, because it’s primary purpose was to prevent an individual from being able to sue the company as a whole for Content that someone else posted, which in my opinion is fair. If someone produced libel against someone, that’s something they need to handle with the person who posted it. It doesn’t make logical sense for the person to go after the platform that held the content as they wern’t involved in that process.

This is what manufacturing consent looks like. This increasing barrage of news about a topic, most of which is based on nuggets of truth but stretched so thin you can see your hand on the other side. The idea is to make you believe something needs to be done just with the sheer volume of time spent talking about something.

The reality is that the ADL is a Zionist front that is full of shit even on their best day, and they want control over Valve the same way they have the CEOs or owners of Reddit, Meta, and even smaller players like Bumble under their thumb. You watch, they will pressure the government to act and then when the squeeze is coming, offer Valve an easy out by joining their special advisory board on tech.

So instead we should let racists, misogynists and lgbtphobes make people believe that something needs to be done to protect white men from oppression?

What are you even talking about?

Oh yeah those reports where they count pepe the frog as extremists content.

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Itch.io games site taken down(lemmy.dbzer0.com)

Technology

!technology@lemmy.world

Our Rules

Approved Bots

Community stats

Community moderators