Get rid of actual fascist imagery and references? Yes please. That shit is rampant.
Get rid of fucking Pepe? …Are you kidding? Way to make yourself and your argument seem fully out of touch. Yeah, sure, there was a point when Pepe was being coopted by right-wingers, but at this point? Like… have you been on discord once ever? Everybody uses Peepo. Moreover, half my trans friends use D&D emojis derived directly from Peepo.
People pointing fingers at Pepe are literally taking the bait and making themselves look less credible, which was presumably the point of it being adopted by assholes to begin with. That fight is over and we won and took it back. Yeesh.
I have never seen a swastika on steam... how do you guys find them? I have come across "git gud" idiots and met one single nazi on there. What in the world are you people up to?
instances of Pepe the frog, a meme appropriated by the far right
LOl, get outta here. I use pepe all the time. It's a friggin' frog. I won't let the far right take him away from me. Fuck off.
You literally just need to go into the discussion boards for trending games or check out the curation pages for groups like “DEI watch.” Guaranteed to find comments and posts of huge ASCII swastikas eventually. There’s next to no moderation for any given game’s discussion board or comments for anything related to it (workshop, screenshots, other media, etc).
I frequent Steam discussions on and off to see what morons say. BG3, Veilguard, anything they accuse of DEI or whatever. In all of my scrolling I’ve never encountered a swastika or someone just straight up being a white supremacist. I’m sure it’s there somewhere, but it’s not rampant. I also see a lot of moderation in those discussions. Goobers getting banned all the time. So if it is, I do think it’s getting moderated to some extent. That probably also falls on the game dev I guess. Not sure who controls the discussion forums.
Yeah, I’m definitely in favor of banning the edgy kids who use fascist imagery on the platform, but Pepe is not and has never been that. Just because some assholes tried to appropriate it for a few months doesn’t mean everyone else should just surrender it to them.
I get it there… but sadly to my knowledge it is lost. Generally speaking when you see the “SomeoneNew has joined the server” and see a pepe avatar… I already pretype the /ban SomoeneNew command watch the screen for 15 seconds… and 9/10 times they say something blatantly racist within that time-frame.
(and don’t think that 1/10 that they don’t means 10% aren’t alt right… of those that don’t manage to break the rules in the first 30 seconds, I don’t think I’ve seen one that’s gone a week without doing so)
Point is… Pepe is the modern swastika… For those who don’t know, the swastika was a peaceful symbol used by many different cultures for thousands of years. But the fact is, using it now just gives legitimacy to those who have attached it to their hateful messages.
The Pepe doesn’t quite have the same significance and weight yet. It’s not too late. Make leftist Pepes. Drown their identifiers in false positives until they become useless.
Well I have to say, off the bat, it needs to be not just leftist/marxist. It would need to have large non offensive use in general discourse.
Again my example of pepe for general discord moderation. It’s not trolls that show up in say political discussion groups. It’s trolls that show up in random game discords or other non-pollitical locations. IE as a moderator I’d also be auto banning someone bringing up random arguements on how we need wealth re-distribution, not because I disagree with them, but because people are just there to talk about a game, and not have political arguement.
and in short that’s generally the thing, IMO Pepe isn’t… really that overwhelmingly good of a meme where it’s just a universal funny to outside groups. But the alt right is the only ones bringing it into more general average Joe locations, along with their hateful rhetoric.
In short for pepe to be recovered it needs… major mainstream Apolitical usage, which quite frankly I don’t see often.
A signal is less useful the more “false” signals (i.e. noise) pollute the medium it’s transferred over.
If we can make it clear that “their” memes aren’t actually just theirs by “re-appropriating” them and abuse whatever secret identification dogwhistles they want to use, we can drown their signals in noise.
Posting Pepes for non-nazi purposes is an act of resistance.
So he could ask Valve who, if the fanboys are to be believed, might actually do something about it, or go ask Elon to fix Twitter who will certainly not
Who or what is actually the authority that decides which symbols used by Nazis are now owned by them? What are the factors to get saved (besides money)?
What industry standards is he talking about here? Steam code of conduct only says you must engage in lawful behaviour. There’s no American law banning far-right symbols. There’s no doubt Steam has a content moderation issue and I would love to see those things go as well. But unless there’s some kind of law then Valve is just going to ignore this problem like they’ve done in the past.
Well, name another game platform that openly allows swastikas. I think they are saying the rest of the industry largely doesn’t allow this so Valve shouldn’t either.
No other gaming platform has the userbase Steam does. I see this more of a numbers thing than anything else. If 2% of the gaming population is far right then it’s going to be much more noticeable when one company has a userbase of ~100million. I’d be very surprised if the other companies like Ubisoft and EA have this kind of content moderation.
I have a steam account. I write like half a review and maybe a handful of comments a year, talking mechanics. The amount of people who don’t even lurk because they are there to play games has to be absolutely overwhelming.
Roblox. It’s a game but also a platform in a sense. It’s full of kids running around yelling racial slurs, kicking users with dark coloured avatars, and lots of far right content. It is like a grade school run by 4chan.
i mean if Roblox is any indication, Valve will probably bend the knee sooner or later. government scrutiny is obliging them to make changes and actually do even basic moderation over there:
The fast-growing children’s gaming platform Roblox is to hand parents greater oversight of their children’s activity and restrict the youngest users from the more violent, crude and scary content after warnings about child grooming, exploitation and sharing of indecent images.
The moves comes after a short-seller last month alleged it had found child sexual abuse content, sex games, violent content and abusive speech on the site. In the UK, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, told parliament: “I expect that company to do better in protecting service users, particularly children.”
Steam has had, for a long time already, a massive far-right community. Browse its communities and you’ll see the most deranged racist, transphobic, homophobic posters. The entire SweetBaby harassment campaign started - and as far as I know, is still going - thanks to a huge Steam curator, and there are even more “Anti-Woke” groups explicitly dedicated to harassing minorities. Last year, Hogwarts Legacy had a intense campaign and won the Best Game on Steam Deck award due to the brigading of these “anti-woke” fans - and you most likely can still look into its community to witness their efforts - and there are still those on the Tabletop Simulator communities that are outspoken about the devs “bending the knee” by removing global chat from their game in an effort to reduce harassment against queer people.
Basically, its a cesspool of the worst gaming has to offer, but none of this affects Valve’s bottom line, who continues their usual business practice: Don’t interfere and do the minimum amount of work. Is it illegal? Perhaps not. But their inaction makes it clear that this is a safe spot for hateful conduct.
I made the mistake of looking at the Spider-Man discussion board. The entire first page, minus like three posts, was all idiots complaining about pride flags.
On the bright side, a lot of them are bots just trying to influence real people. Unfortunately, it is people who made these bots who probably do have that hatred. And of course, not all of them are bots…
Remember to check the discussion board posts themselves (each comment), if there is a mouse icon, it means they own/play the game. If there is no mouse icon, they do not.
With this in mind, you’ll notice the bot propaganda posts 90% of the time have not played nor own the game. At least on Steam, they may have pirated the game to play it, then decided to post on discussion boards about how empathy and recognizing of othe- sorry, “wokeness” is killing gaming.
It’s so stupid how hatred stifles discussion. Ironically hating the things just makes them focus on it more.
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