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.
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.
Valve also does business outside the US. American law doesn’t clear them of their legal obligations in other countries. And besides, legality and morality are not always the same. Providing a platform for hate speech is supporting hate speech, and as far as I’m concerned that’s unethical regardless of whether or not it’s legal.
I don’t think it’s moral to be able to sue a third party for something that another user did though. Like I definitely agree they should have some sort of reporting system active which they do, but it’s not ethical to sue someone who isn’t involved for Content that someone else did.
Let’s look at it from a hypothetical scenario. you’ve decided you want to run a lemonade stand, you become popular everyone in the neighborhood comes to visit your stand. Your town unfortunately has a quite racist sector, knowing this you have put up signs saying please be respectful , we hold the right to refuse service to anyone, and not surprisingly this group decided to come visit as well, a fight breaks out between that section and another group that’s attending your stand. People are hospitalized, instead of them suing the people who caused the injury they’re now suing your lemonade stand because you never stopped people of that group from showing up in the first place.
This is comparable, steam provided the environment to allow for the posting(the stand), they provided a terms of service / guideline of usage for the platform(the signs), they provided a reporting system to be able to report the misconduct to get people banned by both forum mods and official mods(the right to refuse service), people ignored the last two systems and did it anyway, and now people are saying that they should be responsible for people ignoring the rules and doing it anyway.
Ethically, they have done enough that the system practical and should work, if people use the tools that are provided
Morally they are not responsible at all since they’re in independent third party they only provide the infrastructure and they have put practices in place to help avoid a situation like that happening, while also abiding by US federal laws which is where steam is HQ’d
