- cross-posted to:
- steam@lemmy.ml
- games@lemmy.world
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- steam@lemmy.ml
- games@lemmy.world
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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I know the article addresses it but… What about X’ter? Head of Twatter now has an official government position while his shitty company allows Neo Nazi, hate, homophobic, and misogynist behavior runs rampant!
What a fucking farce…
Removed by mod
ADL report
Opinion discarded. Those ADL fucks lie about damn near everything.
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.
OK, there, Tipper.
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.
Yeah let’s suggest these kids spending their time somewhere way safer like Matt Gaetz’s mansion.
Churches and other pedophile centers
DC is both.
Hitler My Friend is a 99 cent game on Steam with an 8/10 positive rating.
A 3D shooter that will change your ideas about alternative history! In this game you will climb into the boots of the unforeseen Adolf Hitler.
There’s more, but I’m not sifting through more dog shit. This is a good thing.
Unsafe? Like is the game going to stab them?
It’s a great place to create extremists, there is basically no moderation and people say some fucking awful shit on Steam forums. I think this is a long time coming, honestly.
I just see people in the discussions forums talking about how to get all the achievements in Stellaris
You definitely aren’t looking very hard
If one has to look very hard to find it then it is not everywhere.
And that’s tea.
Go to Gmod, TF2, CS2, Call of Duty. Popular fighting games. Gmod and TF2 have some of the worst offenders there in my experience. Though the Dustborn forum is basically a 4chan clone with how much people hate that game, not even because the game isn’t good but because they hate queer people and are racist pigs.
Frankly I’m shocked people don’t recognize how prevalent it is. So many game releases have discussion forums plagued with “anti-woke” bullshit plastered everywhere. I just write off the forums for any game that features a black or female main character, let alone LGBT representation.
Many people also don’t know how to recognize thinly veiled hate speech or dog whistles. So it flies over most people’s heads and looks like normal discussions, even though it isn’t.
So… you seriously look at the steam forums as good place for discussion otherwise?
They’ve almost always been shit, besides the occasional troubleshooting thread.
No, I don’t. That’s my point, they’re so unmoderated it’s all just bullshit, and the problem is that it frequently and regularly devolves into hateful bullshit. I wish Valve would have a more robust moderation system so the forums could be more useful. However, Valve just pushed the problem to the developers and doesn’t ensure any baseline level of quality between games.
As much as I do actually like Valve and Steam, this is a big issue and has been forever.
I never look at any discussions on Steam. I’ve never seen ANY discussions/comments on Steam. I just browse the games, look at the overall rating, watch the promo video, buy, and play.
Then why are you in the discussion
I’m only looking when I’m very hard
Where? Where at tho? I’ve been using steam and playing valve games for like 16 years or something like that and I don’t see it anywhere. Maybe the one troll in user made guides but that usually goes away just like any other platform
you can go through the community hubs/reviews of basically any WW2/military shooter or strategy game and see multiple people with Hitler avatars, swastikas, black suns, anything you can think of. it’s extremely prevalent.
hell, just going through the HOI4 community hub and in the first 30 seconds of scrolling I’ve come across at least 3 nazi posts. the forums are completely unmoderated, going through the discussions and I’ve already found multiple instances of straight up holocaust denial/glorification. it’s absolutely rampant.
Oh damn okay. I just didn’t see it because I don’t play those games
Honestly its not just any WW2 game, but any remotely popular game’s updates pages, when steam points & awards got added, several people set up bots to spam every update post on large games to say “Add pronouns and rainbow flags” banking on the conservatives giving them the jester award, others have it set up to spam “Dont give into woke and add (whatever buzzword is currently popular)” so they can get other awards, and like the morons they are, conservatives keep falling for both, giving awards and reacting in the comments.
LGBTQ+ people and allies have mostly stopped opening the comments on updates due to this, so there are multiple instances of people just openly calling for the extermination of anyone LGBTQ+ that never get reported or removed on the updates pages of otherwise not rightwing games.
Forums are supposed to be moderated by the company that makes the game, this means that if someone makes a nazi post and the company has no moderators, or has moderators that are also nazis, reporting it does nothing, even if it’s blatantly against Steam’s TOS.
Something seriously needs to be done about it.
Short version is that for the most part forum moderation for each game is left up to the devs or whoever they appoint, and users can create user groups and curators without much if any restrictions and they don’t particularly give a shit what content the game you want to sell has. The only real exceptions are if it’s illegal in the US, which applies to very little (for example no CSAM).
I find it interesting that the federal government threatening a private entity with legal repercussions if it doesn’t restrict the speech of it’s users isn’t such an obvious violation of the first amendment that lawyers aren’t climbing over each other to fight this one.
And if you don’t see the problem with it, imagine we agree that the federal government should be allowed to restrict what expression can go on on internet platforms content-wise, then imagine Trump and his cronies deciding where the borders lie. They already want to revive the Comstock Act.
Welcome to Commiefornia
The Comstock Act was created by a right wing Christian puritan, and has been fought against by leftists, and supported by conservatives, throughout it’s history. But commies are to blame, sure.
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.
On Jan. 3rd, this will switch to a Republican senator saying the same thing, but the “extremist content” will be “woke.”
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.
Wow this push against Valve kind of popped up quickly and suddenly didn’t it?
Honestly it’s about fucking time. The unmoderated hate speech on their platform has gone on long enough. Many people don’t realize just how bad it is but I recently hopped on some servers and I got called “tranny” and “groomer” because people knew me and they knew I “used to be a boy” (not true, I never was a boy, just in-denial). I’ve also seen people pushing Nazi shit on Steam community discussions and in-game on official servers, it’s insanely bad.
You know were the ones wholl get censored and not the nazis though
Yes, people say mean things on the internet. That’s never going away. Teach your children how to deal with it.
I don’t think that Nazi shit or promotion of terrorism falls under “mean things on the internet” that would be over-trivializing, and I do say that because I have indeed seen many people doing these things in my years on Steam, as well as encouraging violence towards me for being a girl and having “used to have been a boy” (being transgender).
are they “mean things” and are they on the internet? If so it’s mean things on the internet, this doesn’t mean it won’t cause IRL damage, but until it transitions from hateful words to actionable threats it’s just an occupational hazard of the internet.
Are you really sitting here trying to excuse nazism, death threats, and promotion of terrorism?
I won’t excuse death threats because those are generally targeted, and are explicitly illegal.
Nazism and promotion of terrorism are explicitly illegal in some places, while death threats are not explicitly illegal everywhere. So does your opinion on these flip flop depending on where you live?
How about grow a spine and get some morals of your own? Ones that are not dependent on whatever is legal where you are currently located.
If nazism and promotion of terrorism are fine with you, I don’t think you are going to find very many friends here.
the primary reason I’m fine with terrorism is related to how broadly it can be defined and how some people like to expand its definition to silence those they don’t like, same with naziism and how some like to associate anti israilism with nazism. the government should leave the regulations of speech up to the platform and treat them like public bulliton boards (freely accessible to everyone and barely regulated)
You shouldn’t be excusing nazism and the disgusting harmful shit people like LibsOfTikTok do. Even if it isn’t explicityly illegal it still hurts people. Apologia for this shit isn’t okay or acceptable ever. You’re on a Trans friendly instance I can’t believe you’re sitting here trying to justify some types of online abuse.
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone Just curious, what do you have to say about this type of apologia towards Nazism and other forms of online abuse?
People need to understand that the internet is a public space. Family PCs should be in a shared space like the living room and kids need to have parental controls enabled on their smart phone. Beyond that, yeah people need to get thicker skins when it comes to social media (including steam in this).
Strong disagree on parental controls. As a parent, if I don’t trust my kids, they won’t get a device. Period. If I trust them, they will get a device without any limitations. Period.
I really don’t see the point in parental controls, all it does is encourage kids to learn how to get around parental controls. Instead of that, teach kids what it takes to earn your trust and go that route.
I’m a parent, and here are my only controls:
- Switch - passcode because my 4yo kept playing games when not allowed; I told the older kids the code, and will probably remove it soon
- my computers passwords - when my kids are allowed to play games or whatever, I’ll unlock it and tell them what they can and can’t use it for, with zero controls other than the underlying threat of losing privileges entirely if they misuse it
- tablet - each has a passcode, but the kids don’t use them much (only on trips)
- TV - again, 4yo kept watching when not allowed, and the older kids watched as well (but only when the 4yo did it), so they all lost access; will probably remove this soon
We do no internet filters, no enforced time limits (they have their own timers though), and no locks on specific programs. Either I trust them with everything or nothing. They know what they’re allowed to use, and they know the consequences.
I’m not convinced by your approach but I respect that you’ve put a lot of thought into it. I guess my main issue is that it seems some parents don’t think about it at all.
That’s completely fair. IMO, engaged parent > parental controls > absentee parent.
Oh boy, good luck with that outlook in today’s age. You can trust them to get into shit, I believe helicopter parenting has become prevalent because we’ve lost the “village” it takes to raise a kid. You used to be able to trust a parent to step in if they were over at someone else’s house and a discussion got nasty or a fight broke out. You would have neighbors who looked after the kids and would let you know if they were up to some shit. Now the kids talk on discord and other apps, completely unsupervised or at times even inaccessible (after the fact) if they’ve set it up right. You’ve got algorithm’s trained on millions of users to suck your kids in, never ending entertainment with minimal effort.
As a parent, who is completely conscious of everything going on around social media and technology, you will absolutely need to step in. Most adults can’t even handle it, you WILL have to be the parent who sets boundaries on the stimuli their brain craves but has a negative impact on their overall health. You don’t instill healthy eating into a child by giving them unlimited money and telling them to make their own decisions. You work with them, share your experience, let them cook sometimes but monitor over and see the results of their activity. Are they making healthy choices or ordering door dash?
Make it more difficult for them by setting restrictions they have to learn to bypass, even if it feels ridiculous it’s a whole different setup for effort-reward. It will interest them into getting into deeper components of technology and how everything works. It’s absolutely what kids are suppose to do, just like we always figure out a way to get away with shit which ultimately improves various skills.
As a parent, who is completely conscious of everything going on around social media and technology, you will absolutely need to step in
Oh absolutely. My point is that supervision should be as low-touch as possible. Let kids screw up when the stakes are low so they don’t screw up later when the stakes are higher.
As a kid, I got into things I shouldn’t have online, mostly because we only had dialup so I would wait until everyone was in bed to use the computer so I didn’t disrupt phone calls coming in. I ended up getting caught, had a productive talk, and learned what to avoid. That was really effective for me, and the lack of firm guardrails got me interested in learning to computers worked, so I taught myself basic webdev as a teen, which launched me into a software dev role.
If we had strict rules preventing computer use, yes, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into things I shouldn’t, but I also wouldn’t have had the freedom to teach myself software dev and probably wouldn’t have gotten interested in it.
you WILL have to be the parent who sets boundaries on the stimuli their brain craves but has a negative impact on their overall health
Oh, and I certainly do, but I use a carrot and stick approach rather than a “guardrails” approach. I tell them what the rules are, but put nothing in place to prevent them from breaking the rules, and when they do (and they will), I’ll completely remove access for a time after a discussion about why the rules exist. For example:
- video games - we have a system where the kids “earn” playtime (we do it by reading books), and if they go beyond their allotted playtime (we have a max of 2hrs/day), they completely lose the privilege (I take the console away)
- bedtime - we got them watches w/ games on them and told them they couldn’t use them at night; we caught them using them at night, but let them continue and when they were late getting up, we pointed at the watch as the issue and took it away for a while; now they don’t stay up nearly as late w/ their watches
- coming home on time - kid wanted to go to the park alone, so we told them when to be back; they came back late, so I took away their bicycle (that’s how they got there) for a while saying I don’t trust them to come back on time; now they come back on time, and they can ride their bicycle pretty much wherever they want (we have boundaries)
That’s how I was raised, and I found it incredibly effective. I almost never had things taken away as well, because once they showed they were willing to, I tended to listen and follow the rules.
You don’t instill healthy eating into a child by giving them unlimited money and telling them to make their own decisions.
Sure, but you also don’t instill healthy eating habits by not letting them make poor choices either. Let kids fail and fail hard (i.e. don’t catch them), but be there to help them back up.
For example, let them eat as much Halloween candy as they want for one day, and then when they inevitably get a stomach ache, they’ll learn why moderation is important. Likewise with money, if they waste it all on something stupid and don’t have enough for what they really want, they’ll learn the value of delayed gratification.
The more natural and immediate the consequence, the more effective it is at teaching them self-discipline.
Obviously, protect them from the worst harms (e.g. we don’t let our kids play w/ knives or fire), but let them try and fail while the stakes are low.
Just set up redirects on DNS levels for the fedi alternatives. E.g. Reddit->selfhosted Lemmy, Musk’s trumpet called X->selfhosted Mastodon instance, Instagram->Pixelfed and TikTok->Loops. I mainly use Instagram, because we have a class group on it.
That is neat on getting your kids into a better online environment where development isn’t purely incentivized. But surely you must know that’s not the end-all of a kids user experience when being online. You’re not always gonna have them on just your setup either, they will be at their friends and on foreign devices. There’s unfortunately not much you can do in that instance without making a huge fuss.
Is everyone just young without kids and had free reign on the internet and got by ok so it’s more relaxed to you? Were you in a situation where middle school and that age have direct communication to each other? I know teachers and other parents with horror stories of the shit that comes out. It’s mostly what would be considered old school frat boy or fraternity shit but at a way earlier age, some grow out of it but I imagine others just carry on since it never effected them and then we wonder about the trolls who exist on social media lol.
Nah, the point is that technical limitations are no substitute for actual in-person supervision. I don’t have a lock on the sweets cabinet but that doesn’t mean my kids can eat unlimited sweets.
lol I don’t want to get lost in analogies, but these sweets are in their pocket. Their friends are giving them new brands and better sweets. You know what sweets you have in the cabinet, you have no idea how many sweets your kid is eating per day. This is all pretty generic through when considering the entire childhood. Of course you’re gonna be there and watch your kid so they’re not over doing it at age 4, but 12+? Eh, it’s an uphill battle you should stay vigilant on till they’re legally and showing at least basic adult responsibility.
If you’re nearby your kid when you’re in the park or they’re at school interacting with other kids (etc), you’re gonna be curious and want to make sure they’re doing alright but just kinda peripheral paying attention to their actions while mingling yourself. It can be treated respectfully and non intrusively by just checking your router (other devices), what kind of traffic is coming in and out (generic safety), and maybe something along the lines of just asking to see their app activity in their account to get an idea of how they’re spending their time without diving right into their private data.
I don’t really understand the disconnect going on here and maybe everyone is a lot more innocent than I was. I for sure was up to some bullshit online at a young age and that was dial-up. We’re really looking at everything like how the election went, social influencers, and young people getting radicalized online and just throwing our hands up saying it’s all good?
I owe my IT career to my parents trying to restrict my access with parental controls. I learned a lot figuring out how to circumvent those things and cover my tracks.
This is also how I became an Internet plumber.
Agree and using the same approach. Only limitation is purchases, they can’t spend money.
It never stops with parental control. Corps will use it for their own CYA policy as well, specifically age restricting everything
Yup, I actually refuse to allow them to play any games with MTX, at least for now (they’re still young). So Fortnite et al are outright banned in my house because I don’t want them getting used to that environment just yet. We’ll probably get there, but they’re haven’t yet learned how to manage money properly and defer gratification, and I don’t think the consequences of MTX are steep enough to properly teach that lesson. And this isn’t just for them, I ban myself as well, and I’d like to ban my wife, but she gets to make her own choices since she’s an adult.
I totally give them money they can spend on other things, and my older kid has absolutely learned that spending it all at once is a poor choice, but they’re still too impulsive for me to let them loose on predatory games.
Sticks and stones,. something something something…
So, I guess the quick version is that the fun police are upset because of the gamer word. You know, the one used on Xbox live, a lot…
