Not to excuse any hate speech of any kind, but looking around at social media and the effect it has especially on young people and saying "steam forums are the problem" seems like missing the forest for the trees

Civilization as we know it is an unsafe space for most humans

Worth mentioning that the main US senator supporting this, Mark Warner, received substantial donations from Disney, which also poured 1.5 billion (with a B) dollars into Epic Games.

Wouldn't be surprised if some bigwig at Disney pushed for this investigation, too, especially given how fucking flimsy the results were (55% of all hate symbols were fucking pepe the frog).

I mean yeah, no shit. The steam forums could be removed at no loss to the human race, in fact it'd remove a non-negligible percentage of all really shitty talk on the internet if they deleted everything entirely.

twitter, facebook, instagram, etc are not a problem. steam is 👍

Steam forums and groups have become a place to organize far right raiding groups that have harassing people and bullying women and minorities or straight up nazism glorification as their sole objective and Steam just does not care.

For anyone who wants an example, go to the Helldiver's 2 patch logs on the Steam Community Hub.

No matter which one.

If you follow the links, they refer to copy pasta's of hatefull stuff including swastikas but no breakdown of what is counted, the use of the happy merchant (a meme with an antisemitic origin used to convey greed) and the use of pepe the frog in profile pics (pepe is a symbol of hate according to the ADL).

The issue I have with the whole here is that I don't subscribe to the premise on which the analysis is based.

IF you assume pepe is a hate symbol, then each case it is used is an expression of hate and furtherance of that hate. I however reject the premise that pepe is a symbol of hate.

The use of the happy merchant is a bit more of a problem, because I see the antisemitic message it has. However I also see a lot of stupid people that don't.. and have seen the image used (probably in antisemitic context referring to greed) but people associate it with greed primarily.. so this one is an issue, I think I refuse part of the premise, namely that the antisemitism part is a dominant factor when the image is used.

These are the 2 main examples, a lot more in the report that have similar caveats.

Boomers saying and thinking boomer things.

ADL says steam was unsafe after stating that pepe the frog is an extremist symbol to more than double the number of cases found.

Remove the meme, and take into consideration the number of users, 0.1% of users have used some form of extreme symbol or statement. That is a lower ratio of extremism than what Lemmy has.

This is a reach for control and surveillance. Nothing else.

Fuck ADL.

Come back when you can argue without the "but the kids" line of thinking.

I would have agreed if they replaced steam with discord.

Fortunately in the US I trust that their First Amendment has some teeth. If that were happening in most other countries, I'd be seriously worried that this senator might succeed with his evil plans.

If there's one thing I hate about Steam, it's their lack of moderation. There's Nazi shit everywhere, every game who's using "woke" elements like neutral terms for body types or giving people the choice of their pronoun, or having gay characters, or people of color, or women in positions of power, etc. etc. gets the inevitable flood of constant woke crying threads, comments & review bombing. There's many people who glorify the RuZZian invasion of Ukraine as well through their profiles, while I could not even have a freaking avatar depicting a person dangling from a tree, which was graphically maybe a small step ahead of a stick figure from a hangman game. And even outside of politics it's full of trolls and clown farmers (they should really remove that one anyway). You ask for technical help, and everyone tells you basic shit or attacks you. It's a cesspool.

Crunchyroll removed their comments section recently. They said it was because of all the hateful comments for one show. Sony just didn't want to deal with it, so gone, which is a real shame. If the comments are not part of the product being sold, then they will end up getting dropped if abused.

Never forget, Steam allowed Alex Jones to publish his "anti-woke" video game there. And it was as disgusting as you can imagine.

I mean, if your gonna go for the worse of it all, 4chan is right there.

I'm surprised European governments haven't demanded better enforcement of laws when it comes to hate speech on Steam. Instead they regulate stuff like lootboxes or spicy content because they think those are more harmful than fascism apparently.