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.

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.

    • Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org
      5·
      22 days ago

      Yeah I mean, idk what happened there. Brain wasn’t computing well I guess.

      But for real I really don’t know. I’ve noticed that happens with me sometimes where I’ll repeat phrases in a single post

      • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
        2·
        22 days ago

        All good. Looks like my comment got axed for some reason, even though I’ve intended it as a positive critique.

        I’ve noticed that people like using “I mean” as a filler or figure of speech. But when you keep seeing it over and over again, especially multiple times in a single comment, or in a comment chain, it’s really noticable.

        I used to say “uhm” out loud a lot while forming sentences. It’s a placeholder to give your mind a pause to catch up what you are trying to say. A speech therapist highlighted this to me and got me to slowly phase it out by first squelching it and just internalizing the “uhm”, then completely getting rid of it and rely on silent pauses instead. It helped me realize these speechpatterns, doesn’t matter whether they are used as a run on or a pause. And “I mean” really caught on the past few years as a faux intellectual discourse marker, so it’s extra noticable for me.

        Looks like there’s some more about its usage here:

        https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/language-in-the-wild/202408/why-i-mean-became-the-new-thing

        • Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org
          2·
          22 days ago

          Yeah “uhms” and the dreaded “like” are also an issue for me too. I would like to eliminate it from my vocabulary entirely. I make videos and live stream, and I notice it a lot when I watch playback. It’s pretty terrible. Did you have a hard time ridding them from your speech? I should try fixing that.

          • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
            2·
            22 days ago

            No, it was rather easy. I was only eleven years old though. The consciousness of it and the method to squelch it at first, without saying it out loud, helped a lot. The therapist really only highlighted it once for me. But it didn’t help that to get to this point I got traumatized by a whole class of vicious fifth graders laughing at me while I was reciting something in front of the class. 🙄