Steam is 'an unsafe place for teens and young adults': US senator warns Gabe Newell of 'more intense scrutiny' from the government if Valve doesn't take action against extremist content
Steam is 'an unsafe place for teens and young adults': US senator warns Gabe Newell of 'more intense scrutiny' from the government if Valve doesn't take action against extremist content
US Senator Mark Warner comes less than a week after an ADL report accusing Steam of "normalizing hate and extremism in the gaming community."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On Jan. 3rd, this will switch to a Republican senator saying the same thing, but the "extremist content" will be "woke."
ADL report
Opinion discarded. Those ADL fucks lie about damn near everything.
Meanwhile in Ohio...
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/18/us/columbus-ohio-neo-nazi-march-hnk/index.html
Yeah let's suggest these kids spending their time somewhere way safer like Matt Gaetz's mansion.
If we're pitching microtransactions as extremist content, I'm on board.
A good old crusade against videogames.
What has Valve done right?
- Proton
- Steam
- Steam deck
- Steam market (the place to sell underpriced skins for small amounts of money) What has Valve done wrong?
- Loot boxes
- Moderation (it is impossible)
- Their anti-cheat (Swiss cheese of anti-cheats, >!EAC and BattlEye are better!<)
Overall, I prefer Valve and Steam over a Chinese holding firm that almost has the monopoly over the gaming industry and the company with a black logo that has a close-minded CEO and Sweeney'd to Tencent.
What comes to my mind is Battlefront 2, which is sold by Steam. I think I paid $5 for it since I boycotted it back when it first came out to due to loot crates... anyway, I regularly see the n-word used in this game every. single. night. It's used specifically to denigrate people of color, in violent and extremely racist ways.
I don't understand how players with maxed out accounts are able to keep them when they are saying this stuff. How is that not flagged for immediate review? EA is a trash company, and Steam may want to stop selling their games if they can't do the BARE MINIMUM to combat this sort of behavior.
NGL, when I first saw Warner making a public fuss over this, I had a bit of a reaction. Like, no one comes after my boy steam, I like my games and I like my platform. And maybe it's because I don't engage in many public multiplayer games these days, but I just haven't really come across this extremist content frequently enough to feel Congress needs to get involved.
But...
I can see from the comments, my anecdotal experiences aren't the whole picture. And I do get that sometimes in an otherwise free market, regulation is necessary to prevent a situation where a company does the right thing and then suffers financially from the backlash/boycott that ensues. Better to let the government be the ones to take the heat by those that get upset by the moderation.
But I also kind of agree with the sentiment, Congress needs to clean up its own hate speech and ethics, before further legislating what everyone else should be doing.
GabeN: There is nothing you can say to stop me from selling Furry Hitler
Yes, moderate all of that shit off every mass social media system steam, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blue sky, tiktok, YouTube, etc. Debate and compromise on a common set of standards, one for kids spaces and another for adults, and enforce the same rules to everyone with penalties tied to annual revenues so they can't report one set of numbers to shareholders and another when it comes time to pay for the damages they caused by ignoring regulations. That is what regulating and building new markets should look like when you don't have a corrupt oligarchy filled with bribery and regulatory capture.
"they dare to make money without us!"
Steam has abduct kids into gambling for a decade and no authority ever gave a shit about it. The government wants a bigger piece of the cake of an increasing market.
So what gaming platform is Gabe Neweel and His friends part of. Cause this is not about valve. And obviously about making room for a competitor.
Gabe could turn off the entire friends feature and not get a bit of pushback since everyone uses discord anyway.
If it's about Team Fortress 2...alright, yeah. I get it.
OK, there, Tipper.
