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GRTV News - Valve accused of allowing hate speech on Steam
Steam was found to have nearly 2 million instances of hateful content in a recent survey by a leading anti-hate group.
Audio transcription
"Ahoy there, welcome to GRTV News, I'm Alex as usual covering the afternoons latest and greatest when it comes to gaming, technology, entertainment and whatever you like as well as whatever you love, we always have it here for you at GRTV News and if you like what you see and you want to see more, there's a lot of pauses in this intro today I'm noticing, if you like what you see and want to see more be sure to check out Gamereactor wherever you get it from for more gaming reviews, gaming previews, exclusive content, interviews and of course so, so, so much more but without further ado, today we're talking Steam, now the Anti-Defamation League which sounds like a sort of awful superhero team up but is actually the world's leading sort of anti-hate organisation by, you know, sort of labelled that by themselves it's worth mentioning, has pointed at Steam and said that they're not doing enough in order to combat hate within sort of the online digital platform that Steam is, so more than 1.8 million instances of extremist or hateful content was found on Steam and there was a huge sort of amount of research done here, you know, 458 million user profiles were looked at, 152 million group and profile avatar images, over 600 million comments on user profiles and groups and it found, as I say, 1.8 million, nearly 2 million pieces of extremist or hateful content, Nazi imagery, support for terrorist groups, use of terms like white power and other sort of racist and derogatory terms were found in plenty in sort of hundreds of thousands of groups and profile comments and basically sort of what does the ADL or the Anti-Defamation League want to change about this and it sort of, it did make some mistakes in its report because it said that Valve doesn't have anything that already stops that from happening which isn't true because a quick search on Steam's page will see that there are guidelines to what can be posted. The problem is that the user posting guidelines are not the same as sort of the content moderation that you see within the games themselves, so community posts and things that come from user generation aren't as strictly monitored as things that are made on Steam's sort of front page and games that get through there, so things like guidelines and filtering can just sort of be ignored easily through that."
"As the ADL report here says, the fact that extremist and hateful content is relatively easy to locate on Steam raises questions regarding the efficacy of Steam's moderation efforts.
So yeah, it basically doesn't think that it's doing enough and it recommends that Valve make significant changes to their approach to platform governance both in terms of policy and practice to address the ways in which hate and extremism have proliferated on the Steam platform. So, in short, they basically want Valve to tighten up its guidelines so that people aren't spreading hate as much on Steam. And in the one sense, that does seem like a very, very positive idea, but I'm sure there's going to be a lot of pushback if Valve does decide to sort of put a stricter hand on moderating content because a lot of people will express sort of views on Steam and in sort of other online spaces like Discord as well that they wouldn't necessarily express in real life as they feel that these are safe spaces for them. Whether they should be is unknown and I don't think that Steam should have any space for things like racism, derogatory content, derogatory terms being used on people's comments, but there's always going to be someone who goes, wait, this is you. Yeah, well, is it though? But anyway, I'm more intrigued to hear what you guys think about this. Let me know what you think that Steam should do, whether it should do anything at all, and I'll see you next week for some more GRT news. Goodbye."
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