A senator for the US government has called on Valve to address complaints about the amount of racist, sexist and hateful posts by users on Steam.
  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    201·
    1 month ago

    Is this even a real problem on steam or something some random dude wrote to his senator about?

    My biggest issue was valve being slow to vac ban people bragging about cheating, which was almost exlcusive to TF2.

    Seen way worse on reddit than steam for “hate” content.

  • TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.comEnglish
    194·
    1 month ago

    They are going after the billionaire who won’t play along with Trump.

    And they are being on purpose hypocritical and smarmy. Even that senator’s wikipedia page labels him as a businessman before being a senator. Priorities priorities

  • danc4498@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    1 month ago

    This is an issue 47 US senators care deeply about. 53 of them think both sides need to do better, so instead of action we’ll just wait and see.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      441·
      1 month ago

      A US senator can absolutely, unambiguously write to a private corporation asking them to more strictly moderate their platform. You’re just parroting “muh freeze peach” having zero idea where that starts and ends.

      I highly recommend informing yourself where this boundary is; even if you particularly disagree with this senator, citing the First Amendment is the weakest possible argument here except among people who also don’t understand where the line is.

            • vinnymac@lemmy.worldEnglish
              12·
              1 month ago

              If you are concerned by fascism, I recommend calling your representatives and even writing letters to them.

              In the case above, a sensible well written letter sent by an individual that was put in power to defend the interests of the American people is not fascism.

              It’s important to understand what Fascism looks like. Such as every billionaire bending the knee when a politician gains power, or what we see with Musk in an invented cabinet position. The merger of government and corporate powers which will directly hurt the interests of the people in a state.

            • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
              4·
              1 month ago

              A lot of fascists don’t realize they’re fascist.

              Mussolini once said “Fascism can be better described as corporatism, the combination of state and corporate power”. Under fascism, everything and everyone is socialized under the state, and everything becomes a tool of the state. For this reason, some historians call fascism “State Socialism”, contrasting Hitler’s “Racial Socialism” or Marxism’s “Class Socialism”, each of which use a totalizing state to socialize everyone into one group. So a government official putting pressure on a corporation to silence speech the state doesn’t like is openly fascist, and many people think they want that sort of fascism.

              In my book The Graysonian Ethic, I talk about why people think they want fascism(though they might call their fascism something different because they want to pretend they’re not calling for fascism) but they actually don’t:

              “The truth is, everybody thinks that they want fascism because they imagine that fascism will do exactly what they want and nothing more. They look at all the groups of people that they do not like and they imagine that the fascists will go and clamp down on those people and then just stop. Reality is not so kind. Yes, the evil empire did go out and do reprehensible things to the group that they identified as causing the problem. Of course, you do not need to make any kind of choices to whether someone of that particular group caused any problems to realize that most people within any given group are not responsible for the actions of the few. Within any given group there are lots of people who are just trying to sit back and live their lives without hurting anyone. Despite that, this great evil empire went out and exterminated a people. They did not stop there though. To them, even amongst the people that they claimed to protect and try to save there were two sorts of people: those who supported the regime and those who did not. For many of those who supported the regime, they were given the means to gain tremendous wealth and power in a very short period of time. For those who did not, they had their livelihood stripped away, they were shunned, in some cases they joined the groups who faced extermination.”

        • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
          18·
          1 month ago

          I don’t think you can block yourself. Maybe ask the Lemmy devs to implement it? Seriously, all I’m asking you to do is read to understand where your rights as an American citizen start and end; it’s for your own good.

        • Mannimarco@lemmy.worldEnglish
          17·
          1 month ago

          Calls other people fascist bootlickers, votes for Trump, you’re a special kind of stupid aren’t you

            • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
              13·
              1 month ago

              “A solarpunk polity would replace centralised forms of state government with decentralised confederations of self-governing communities […]”

              Stalin notoriously loved checks notes heavily decentralizing government power akin to anarcho-communism.

              “This politician writing against fascism is too fascist. This decentralized political system is too tankie. This politician ousting competent government officials he perceives as disloyal to his coup is juuuuust right.”

    • Euphorazine@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      1 month ago

      Now do the congress letter sent to Amazon asking to fire Dan Clancy from twitch Twitter link.

      I guess it’s only cancel culture when the left do it?

  • Skates@feddit.nlEnglish
    1760·
    1 month ago

    “As Black Friday and the holiday buying season approaches, the American public should know that not only is Steam an unsafe place for teens and young adults to purchase and play online games, but also that, absent a change in Valve’s approach to user moderation and the type of behavior that it welcomes on its platform, Steam is playing a clear role in allowing harmful ideologies to spread and take root among the next generation,” says Warner

    What? What the fuck, democrats?

    First off - cool letter bro, I’ve always wanted to write one but unfortunately we are in the current century. I don’t know what kind of a pretentious cuntwaffle you have to be to write a letter at this point in time, but apparently it helps if you’re a senator.

    Second - really? Valve should moderate user scrrenshots to make sure there are no swastikas? What if I have a swastika tattooed on my face and the pic is a closeup shot? What if my swastika is related to Hinduism, not fascism? Listen, cumstain - if you’re not gonna do your job as a government and you’ll allow extremist speech by hiding behind your ‘freedom of speech’ bullshit, don’t be surprised when a corporation can’t do it either. What, the KKK is too hard to stamp out for the US government, so let’s put Valve on the job? A Neonazi fuck just won another presidential campaign, you’re telling me your country is against swastikas? Fuck outta here.

    And third - I’d really like to know what makes steam “unsafe for teens and young adults”. Is valve impregnating kids now? Do they carry measles in their steam decks? Is gaben running with scissors in school hallways? Or is it just that you’re an out of touch cunt who last understood technology when horse power involved actual horses?

    • zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.devEnglish
      381·
      1 month ago

      You’re apparently unfamiliar with the concept of the open letter or writing to a specific person instead of just spewing garbage out a general agency. It’s not uncommon.

      The Hinduism excuse really doesn’t fly most of the time, especially when we’re talking about hate speech. It’s pedantic and weaselly and does not pass the smell test.

      Unsafe could mean, for an examples I have seen on steam forums, that minorities get harassed or told they should be exterminated. Just like Nazis should be scared to be in public IRL, they shouldn’t have safe spaces online either.

      I know by your language you already have your mind made up and probably have a real strong opinion on ethics in gaming journalism, but extremism is a real problem.

      I don’t really want to engage with people like you, so I won’t be responding further, but I didn’t really want to leave your bs unchallenged.

    • Chozo@fedia.io
      393·
      1 month ago

      This reads like it was written by somebody with a swastika icon on Steam.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      242·
      1 month ago

      Jesus christ, chill the hell out. 💀

      1. Who still writes letters anymore? Uh… A lot of people? Especially sitting senators to massive, multi-billion-dollar corporations? Would you have preferred they go on some shitty social media platform to write “ayo get your shit together fr fr”? Fellas, is it gay pretentious to use your position in government to bring attention to an issue? Have you never written a letter?

      2. One of the reasons a neo-Nazi fuck just won the election is because these online spaces allow fascist rhetoric to run rampant. (Edit: probably also the general attitude that shuns literacy and intellectualism, like “writing a letter? how pretentious lmaooo”) You’re bringing up a nonsensical, extreme edge case to justify why action shouldn’t be taken in 99.999% of cases. I also as a Hindu (a religion I’m sure you actually understand or care about) get a facial swastika tattoo and then post that as my pfp to Steam. Definitely how that really works in the actual real world.

      3. Writing coherently about an actual issue facing a platform like Steam actually shows that he’s more in-touch than most politicians. You sound deeply insecure.

      This entire comment oozes intellectual dishonesty.