The New Hampshire Senator sent Valve boss, Gabe Newell, a letter decrying the vast amount of user-generated politically incorrect content on the giant gaming platform.
According to the letter, she claims that Steam's users of displaying and espousing "neo-Nazi, extremist, racial supremacist, misogynistic, and other hateful sentiments". That's every card up in her sleeve, including playing the race and gender card.Hassan wrote in the letter, available at Vice (opens in new tab)
"As the most popular and largest digital distribution platform for computer video games, including online community and communication features, Steam has tremendous domestic and global reach and is used by computer video game players of all ages,".
"Disturbingly, Steam has a significant presence of users displaying and espousing neo-Nazi, extremist, racial supremacist, misogynistic, and other hateful sentiments. Valve should be taking steps to prevent harmful content, especially given the relationship between online comments and violence in the offline world. Extremist content on Steam, found after cursory keyword searches using terms and images commonly associated with neo-Nazi, extremist, and racial supremacist ideologies, is pervasive."
Clearly, this federal senator is calling for censorship of Steam, because of content that "offends" her or stuff she doesn't like. Um, this is why we have a rating system called the ESRB and for those games that aren't rated by the ESRB, they're often displayed with an NSFW-Mature Content warning. Plus, Steam has an ignore option to block those types of games if you don't want to see them. So, what's the problem? Nothing, not a damn thing.
In the United States, political incorrectness and so-called "hate speech" is legal nationwide, and it would be a legal violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as it guarantees freedom of speech. What isn't considered legal speech, however, is threatening words (e.g. death threats, doxing (revealing someone's personal info without consent), and obscenity (publicly displaying indecent content of sexual or body fluids and etc.).
The problem with censorship is that people can easily label others as 'Nazis', which can hurt other companies, businesses, and individuals. (Or make a Twitter account, get the badge, tweet something nasty in the name of the company, then see the stonks go down LMAO)
I'll give one example of why hate speech laws are insane and authoritarian. I can't remember exactly what the slur word was, but in the U.K., there was this man who was a science teacher, the police busted in his house, arrested and fined him for saying a "mean word" via email, Mudshark. That was one of the few words that's illegal to say in the U.K. hate speech law, but in context, the man was referring to the actual Mudshark, the animal. The slur Mudshark usually means a white woman (or any lighter-skinned woman) screwing with a Black man or a dark-skinned person.
Hate speech laws are absolutely absurd and very authoritarian. It takes away people's rights of free expression.
In the U.S., freedom of speech is important for free thinkers, anyone has the right to create or say things even if other people don't like them, but they're not immune to criticism, as criticism is also free speech.
In most places in Western Europe, you're not allowed to criticize or even deny the Holocaust or you'll be fined or imprisoned. But you can criticize and deny other genocides. Suspicious, don't you think?
"To Find Out Who is in Control, Find Out Who You're Not Allowed to Criticize."
What the Senator is calling for is very close to breaking this U.S. federal law, 18 U.S. Code § 241 - Conspiracy against rights.
If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; or
If two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured—
They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.
This senator is one of the reasons why people hate boomer politicians and church/soccer moms. They like to sugarcoat everything and want everyone to have G-rated Halmark-style crap because they think they have moral authority.
She’s a Democrat and a "Soccer Mom", ‘Nuff said. This is her priority rather than actually helping the people of New Hampshire, whose minimum wage is still $7.25/hr and we’re going into 2023. A gallon of gas is still over $3/gal in New Hampshire. At one point, when the price of gas peaked, it was near $6/gal. All of that is going on, but she's worried about "hateful content" in video games, which is pathetic. She’s been in office for too long since 2004 and has gotten too comfortable with doing nothing. This is why people hate politicians, and they always have a bad reputation for corruption. Politicians are always crooked and are incapable of being anything but hypocrites.
Despite being <1% of the population, I find it interesting that it's always "Neo-nazis" that are the top extremist group that politicians want to censor, but not the other more prominent gangs or groups like Antifa, BLM, foreign governments, etc. Most people can't even take that word very seriously anymore because it's all tiresome, and people are comparing the word "Nazi" as a white equivalent to the N-word.
Being one of those isn't illegal either any more than being a black supremacist and Antifa. I also find it very interesting that they aren't talking about censoring them when they are much larger groups in the U.S.
While <1% of the population exists, the government believes: "This is clearly >99% of the population."
Gabe Newell and Steam have been a blessing to the gaming world so far, I don't think he will be intimidated by this utter vapid bullshit, but I fear what will happen to Steam when Gabe retires or dies, it could be catastrophic if some spineless clown or some woke parasite take over and destroy all the hard work he put into building this amazing platform.
Will he cave? We don't know, but if he does, most of Steam's consumer base (and the money that comes with it) will disappear SO FAST, that it will make The Flash blush in embarrassment. There are several alternatives to Steam such as GoG, Itch.io, and the Zoom Platform that gamers would flock to.
It's always "Sexism in gaming" and "Radicalisation in gaming" but never "Pride flags in gaming," I think the latter is by far way more common and destructive, the way this world is going on. Normies come after gamers because gamers are based, period. Gamers are more based than bookworms, movie-goers, and musicophiles. Games from the West, in the 1990s and up 'til the mid-2010s were based until the non-gaming normies took over the major gaming companies and nurtured them to death. And this is probably why some classic games are not being remastered and re-released on modern platforms because they don't want us to experience them.
These often increasing talks of "nazis" and the other stuff being censored will consequently cause the Streisand effect, and these politicians and corporations have been making it worse since the 2010s. Sooner or later, it will bite them in the ass. The Streisand effect is a phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove or censor information has the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information, often via the Internet. It's named after American singer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress the California Coastal Records Project’s photograph of her residence in Malibu, California, taken to document California coastal erosion, inadvertently drew greater attention to the photograph in 2003.
According to Vice, in September, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would spend $700,000 of tax-payer money to investigate “radicalization in gaming.” Earlier this month, the race-bait and actual racial supremacist organization, Anti-Defamation League, also made a statement on this topic.
Do you see what I'm talking about here? They don't want us to speak, they don't want us to have fun, and they want to control us because they don't like what we have to say.
It's free speech, deal with it.
Here's a Youtube video from Vee talking about this situation.
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