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’.”
Yes. Well, it depends on the game. A lot of games know that their users will use the Steam forums to complain or ask questions so they’ll attend them in a formal manner. Others are just chaotic cesspools that are completely ignored by the developers/publishers.
The Steam forums really are kinda garbage but I don’t think it’s because of lack of moderation. It’s because they’re the most minimal interface with no good search function, no good way to figure out what’s changed, and it’s missing zillions of other features that exist in modern forums.
So really they are just like any other online forum. Better to have them than not. Reddit or Lemmy is probably a better way to get more useful information however.
There are some niche games though that won’t have subreddits and that’s where steams forums can be useful
Better UX would be nice, but that’s not what would solve the Nazi problem.