Senator Mark Warner’s letter follows an ADL report about extremist content on the platform.
US Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has sent a letter to Valve CEO Gabe Newell asking if the company intends to take measures to curtail extremist content on Steam. The letter references a report by the Anti-Defamation League that identified a large number of user accounts and user-created groups “that glorified antisemitic, Nazi, white supremacist, gender- and sexuality-based hate, and other extremist ideologies” on the PC gaming platform.
The letter features a high-level view of the kind of hateful content the ADL found on Steam. That includes “40,000 groups with names that included hateful words, with the most prominent being ‘1488,’ ‘shekel,’ and ‘white power’.”
I think there is some merit to this notion but the Steam Community forums are actually quite helpful sometimes. Yes, having more discussions move to Lemmy (not Reddit!) might be good. But my main point is that Steam has a lot of nooks and crannies for Nazis to hide in, e.g. Steam groups. Those are entirely separate from the actual game discussions and could be easily done away with at no loss to the average gamer.