In the letter, Democrat senator Mark Warner argues that Valve’s content moderation doesn’t meet industry standards, and says he wants Valve to “crack down on the rampant proliferation of hate-based content”.
The exact hateful stuff he’s talking about was highlighted in that report by the Anti-Defamation League last week. Its many findings include swastikas in profile pictures, antisemitic images such as the “happy merchant”, and instances of Pepe the frog, a meme appropriated by the far right that - let’s be honest - has never washed the stink off. Steam is “inundated with hate” as a result of these findings, say the anti-discrimination group.
While the simmering bubbles of fascism won’t be news to the average Steam user (or average internet user, to be frank) that doesn’t mean we ought to get complacent about them. It’s proof, says senator Warner, that Valve is lacking good moderation.
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.”
Do American streets count as a platform?
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.
Also have noticed the “anti-woke” “curator”.
It’s simply amazing. Imagine not buying a game because the protagonist is a woman. If you don’t want to play Control, you’re missing out.
just a cesspool of rizzless dudes trying to impress other rizzless dudes with how edgy they can be by shrinking their worldview.
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.
Sadly it’s like that for pretty much any game.
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.
My favorite is when people ask “Is this game dead?” and it’s a five year old single player game. What are you thinking?
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.
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.
Swastikas, okay. Happy merchant, sure. But how is Pepe an alt right symbol now? I read half of an article about it which seems to conclude that it depends on the context the meme is being used in. If it’s by a nazi in their username, it’s a nazi symbol, wow. To me this feels like “serial killers often ate bread for breakfast, so all of Germany is now a dogwhistle for serial killers.”
Pepe was previously coopted by far-right groups. The usage has died down since the creator of the original comic began suing people, but there are still people who put Pepe in Trump hats and shit.
Pepe has been a dogwhistle/symbol of hate for years already. Richard Spencer’s comical punch in 2017 happened just moments after he was explaining why he wears a Pepe pin. The ADL has it officially registered as a hate symbol.
Maybe it has died down in recent years, but you not being aware of these - frankly, very clear cut - definitions doesn’t make it ridiculous or inappropriate. Nazis take over symbols, that has been their modus operandi since their inception. None of this is new.
I’d recommend some googling about the subject.
You may be willing to cede the cartoon frog to the Nazis for their exclusive use, but many people aren’t. If you assume that everyone you see using it is one you’ll be vastly overestimating the number of Nazis in the world.
I’m not “willing” to do anything, it is a fact. You may as well argue about the origins of the Swastika or the Iron Cross. Pepe is a hate symbol, and while not everyone using it might be a nazi, they are using nazi imagery. The fact that “many people” aren’t willing to drop it, despite its extensive, well documented use by extremists is a well made point, but not the one you think.
And there’s no “overestimating” of nazis in the world. We live in a culture of white supremacy. There’s no point in splitting hairs about how offensive or not a cartoon frog is. The easiest solution is to simply not use it.
Equating a meme that has a variety of potential uses to a swastika is absolutely unhinged
The Swastika interestingly is four right angles, so the symbol occurs all over human society hundreds and even thousands of years before Nazism found it.
People thought any symbol so common throughout history had to be a quasi-good thing. They used it as a general sign of good luck. About the only thing that even comes close to the swastikas ubiquity and thrust of sentiment post-war is the “smiley face” symbol.
The Nazis saw all this and sent scam archeologists around the world to unearth and then piece together a narrative that their Aryan supermen ancestors had been the rightful masters of the earth. From the moment they made that decision, it’s had the stink of human ashes wafting off it ever since. Fire, wind, fortune, ‘North’, Kali’s creative destruction, and dozens more meanings all wiped away. So many cultures and groups robbed of a symbol or perhaps a phoneme even with their own contexts.
Draw the right angles. It is the wheel that crushes now. It means hate. We have a conditioned response as a society to it and each one of us personally has our own gutteral secret feelings about it. But the old meanings are all dead.
One of fascism’s best features is simply bald faced stealing. They stole that symbol from thousands or millions of people who used it every day. Pepe at least carries his own eternal chagrinn with him in protest of being used as a dogwhistle, but thats about it. His expressions are your expressions.
Pepe is damaged goods though. He endures well past his relevance and utility as an internet comic character when very similar concepts (rage faces, Polandball) have had their time and slowly lost ubiquity. But Pepe endures not JUST as a Nazi dogwhistle but as a symbol that even if someone is not right wing they still would like to convey a certain unsociable edginess, like a colorful threat display on a jungle animal. The disposessed middle class, the failure to launch kids, the kissless sensitive souls, all find commonality with the frowning frog. And these are the people they target. People use Pepe as a flare to suggest they’re in pain and only feel safe talking about it to other anonynous people on the same boat. Aka the most vulnerable to radicalization. Clinging to Pepe is advertising that you are looking for something that you don’t even know what it is, but normies can’t or won’t give it to you. Pepe is a green light to radicalization.
And like the various versions of the swastikas before they became THE Swastika, Pepe did nothing to deserve this. Just like everyone else under Nazi occupation.
But the old meanings are all dead.
I’m sorry, but this is completely false. The swastika is still used all across the world for its original meanings. If you’d said this about e.g. Norse symbols like the Valknut or Sonnenrad, I’d be 1000% on board with you, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’ve not been to anywhere that Buddhism is common if you think everyone associates the swastika with Nazism.
There are specific versions of the swastika that Nazi Germany created that are only associated with Nazism, such as the 45-degree rotated swastika, or obviously any swastika embedded within another German military symbol, but to assert that the basic symbol itself has been co-opted is very Euro-centric.
Its a complicated thing for sure. I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of peace? If it isn’t fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham feel like they HAD to?
And that was a decade before the mass killings of the Holocaust. A decade before America intervened.
I fear the answer is there is no right answer. Sometimes groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that, but like hell was it fair to them.
I feel like you had to be there. Frankly, the pepe symbol was co-opted so whether you like it or not, you should be cognizant of its history and how people choose to use it.
Every point the other user is making - the iron cross, the swastika, the SS, people know even if they weren’t there because of how apparent the symbols were and why they were used.
Then there are dog whistles when it became wrong to hold hateful beliefs and people started using combinations of the numbers 1488 or two H’s simultaneously. Pepe was co-opted and used as 4chans alt right mascot and spread out beyond it, into internet campaigns for fascism (not just pro-Trump). That’s the thing about co-opting symbols, fascism doesn’t care what they stand for, if they like it, it’s very difficult to keep it safe. A prime example of this is the fictional, known cop-killer Frank Castle, The Punisher, being co-opted by cops and white supremacists. His logo should instill fear into the fascists heart, instead his logo has been the conservatives wet dream since the 1980’s, and was seen in 2017 during Charlottesville.
Pepe’s usage dying down because people were getting sued doesn’t mean that it suddenly stopped being used by shitty people, it just means it’s swept under the rug with all their other dog whistles. Post 2016 Pepe was abducted and reused just like every other hate symbol. Fascists are never creative enough to make something of their own so almost every single symbol that’s currently tied to the ideology has been stolen.
I would say that you are right that post 2016 Sad Pepe isn’t 100% alt-right, but to be honest these style of memes do not last very long. Each generation of meme lasts about 3 to 5 years and they only really last in that generation of people who enjoyed them. That is to say, kids on the Internet now don’t know Pepe’s history. Would they use him? Maybe, except definitely not because they don’t use memes like that, Gen Z and Gen A do not use TopText BottomText memes, character memes, old RageFu memes.
Memes of today have variations of GigaChad and the anti-NPC (they don’t know I’m ____, or crying behind the mask) which are developed RageFu characters. Pretty much only Sad Pepe exists in this sphere and isn’t entirely co-opted, but even then, Sad Pepe is also commonly used on boomer Facebook for posts when men hate their wives.
I agree that it sucks to lose something to fascism. Pepe didn’t deserve it. But like all memes, his history ran its course and he won’t be used in many new ways anymore. The people who are still using him are using him for specific reasons beyond just nostalgic meme. But who knows, memes cycle. Maybe he will be brought back with a new vigor for anti-Nazi memes created by leftists. Until then though, all you need to do is just look up various events and “Pepe” and you’ll see a whole new side of Pepe that maybe you hadn’t realized. Pepe and Elon, Pepe and Trump, Pepe and Putin… Okay I went to Google that last one myself out of curiosity and literally an Iron Cross Pepe sniping Hillary Clinton. I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP.
I suggest, “was Pepe meme at Charlottesville 2017” and going to images. Another good choice would be “was Pepe meme at January 6th”.
Pepe was not present in 2017, but it shows you the type of memes he’s used in. Pepe however, was present in D.C. on January 6th. Sorry for the BuzzFeed article but it had the image.
You can defend Pepe all you like, I know that in his heart he is not a hate symbol. But Pepe is being used as one, so you need to be critical of when you see him and why. It might be completely innocent, but you must know that the chances of that are low. At least now hopefully you aware of his history and why others are skeptical and critical of his usage. Other meme characters don’t get dressed up to play political hitman. Other meme characters aren’t as heavily used by conservatives
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It really does depend on how many those “many people” are. Too many to dismiss them as irrelevant, it appears to me.
Pepe has been sensationalized for a while now in the media as being a hate symbol. I think it’s because you see it largely on 4chan which traditional media demonizes.
I’m not on 4chan, but it seems like it has similar problems to Steam: a large userbase and poor content moderation gives insufferable people a platform to spread hate from. These problems aren’t unique to either platform, but the news likes to latch on to them.
I hate that some people consider Pepe to be a hate symbol. He’s just an expressive frog, dang it
I guess I’ve been out of the loop for pre-hate Pepe (pre-2016), but the only reason I know of him at all is because of all the Nazi/Quon/KKK folks blasting him all over Twitter and everywhere else. I’ve always assumed everyone knew since it’s been almost a decade, and anyone using him these days is doing so in bad faith.
Pepe was and always has been a neutral meme figure. And I’m not going to let some fking nazis take my meme frog!
Pepe was a neutral meme. He is not anymore.
https://beehaw.org/comment/4105872
The sad reality is that he is a politicized figuredhead for fascism. You can try and use him, but you need to be aware of how others use him, and it will end up reflecting more poorly on you than it will help reclaiming him.
I suggest looking the links on my comment linked, but at the very least on your own look up, “Pepe meme Putin”, and “was Pepe at January 6th”. People are using him to storm the capitol and dressing him up in an iron cross to assassinate political figures. That’s not just casual memes :(
I say this as someone who grew up with his era of memes (my first memes were icanhazcheezeburger which was the precursor to RageFu). I remember his good days too man.
But Pepe got Alex Jonesed. He got assaulted by the MAGA cult and they put him on a cross like Jesus and now he’s dying for their sins. I don’t think we can save him.
Clown pepe has beren used for hare, vyt all the other ones not really. It’s used in twitch widely just for the happy frog it is.
It was pretty heavily associated with the alt right a decade ago as it was getting more popular. Some alt right meme communities like frenworld and clown world were centered around it, with overtly fascist pepe variants. It’s gotten more popular in a lot of other circles, but if someone identifies enough with it to use as a profile picture I’d at least check their posting history.
Pepe was used as the mascot for all sorts of content on Reddits “the_donald”
I think the issue is possibly rooted deeper than just usage on steam. I mean I know steam could/SHOULD do more to fight it, but I mean…has said US senator looked at the newly elected government and the people that voted for said government? I mean damn dude.
The rot is deep and is very soon going to be considered “default” behavior.
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.
We’ve come across it all too often, even personally been attacked before just for asking a game to fix its pronoun usage before.
Now we just don’t bother saying anything and keep reporting until something is done.
Imagine taking the ADL seriously.
Imagine using ad hominem to dismiss factual and easily verifiable points.
NataliePortman.gif: to remove them, right?
I have it all censored and replaced by hearts.
Whataboutism to avoid the conversation talking about Twitter
Why would a gaming news website talk about twitter? How is it whataboutism? Two things can be bad at the same time.
Not the gaming site article. The senator themselves
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
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Culling out hate speech isn’t censorship.
And the far right using free speech/censorship as a cover for hate speech is always in bad faith.
It’s not the games they’re talking about.
Consider reading the article.
RTFA before replying
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Whatever the result in, I wish there won’t be over-moderation that too Western-centric.
Not all swastika are Nazi (I live in a country where swastika is simply symbol of religion and peacefulness). Not all words that too similar with offending word in English are bad (some games literally banned Indonesian for having “nasi goreng” as their name, too similiar with Nazi they said.)
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)?
Curious what industry standard Senator Warner is judging Valve against because a social media site, which Warner is comparing Valve to, being filled with Nazis and the far right feels like the standard, even if some sites at better at quarantining them than others. Also, “intense scrutiny” from Congress is kind of an empty threat at the best of times, but especially when Congress is about to be run by the sort of people who aren’t going to see this as a problem.
