Me. There’s just an irony in pointing out the failure of Steam to effectively moderate (true) when Twitter has a much larger footprint, seems to be actively encouraging hate speech not just tolerating it, and is being rewardered for such behavior. The article points this out too:

There’s an aspect of irony to the complaint: Elon Musk turned Twitter into a haven for racism and far-right rhetoric, after all, and he’s being rewarded with a high seat in the incoming US government.

Senators only have so much time to pick and choose which issues to raise awareness about, so Steam seems like a weird fight to pick given the wider landscape ¯_(ツ)_/¯ . Could just be there’s a much higher chance of getting an actual change from Steam than a larger social media platform.

Not only that, even the ADL try as they might can’t really make that claim with their chests. They qualify that pepe edits exist that have antisemitic connotations, which is true of literally any of the 4chan template meme characters.

There’s nazi trollfaces, nazi wojacks, nazi chads, you can’t use that as a reason to call pepe an antisemitic dogwhistle.

I think it really depends on the game (genre?).

I mostly play economic strategy / tycoon games and the forums are pretty chill. The most “controversial” threads revolve around gameplay mechanics discussion or perhaps complaints about lack of updates.

I don’t think I’ve even seen anything approaching what you are describing in economic strategy game forums.

I would most definitely oppose shutting down the steam forums.

I’ve seen whole threads in game forums dedicated to Nazism, and I myself have been called a “groomer” and the t-slur because people knew be as a boy before I transitioned. Legitimately horrible place, they absolutely need to take more action against this.

But like, are there people that read it and get an existential crises? People need to learn to read and let go. There will always be dickheads and trolls.

There’s the “this is too woke” gang, and then there’s the “this doesn’t have enough representation” gang. You can’t win.

If you look at the same section of the ADL website that Pepe is in, you’ll see the first page is just full of simple numbers (symbols are listed alphabetically). I don’t see anyone doing a similar study to the one posted here, but with “100%” instead of Pepe.

Also, side note, ADL lists “ACAB” as a hate symbol because some skinheads are racist and use the phrase. They have a similar disclaimer in the Pepe listing that context is an important consideration.

Pepe to me seems like the opposite of the Confederate flag.

Pepe is an internet meme that is in some cases used by racist and hateful people to carry their message, but the primary function is internet nonsense.

The Confederate flag is a symbol or hate and oppression that in some situations is used to express country & westerns ideals of freedom and roaming the country with not a care in the world… without the racist subtext… however you cannot deny the basis of its use and thus should not use it.

That’s not whataboutism. Whataboutism is when someone brings something unrelated up to make the main topic look less important and that’s not happening here.