Looks like Half-Life 2 developer Valve and its digital distribution platform Steam is back on the political menu. Every few years Valve finds itself the target of politicians and grifters hoping to tap into the private company’s vast profits. The latest politician to pick up the second controller is Democrat U.S. Senator of Virginia Mark Warner who sent a letter to Valve co-founder Gabe Newell threatening “intense scrutiny from the federal government” quickly following in the wake of the ADL’s recent report about Steam.
In its report, the Anti-Defamation League declared that Steam is “rife with extremism and antisemitism” while providing a list of examples and findings to back up their claim. However, despite the ADL’s caterwauling, the findings show that less than 1% of users meet the organization’s definitions and ideas of what constitutes being hateful or extreme.
The ADL’s report was not about exposing how little such occurrences are on a platform with hundreds of millions of users. Instead, it was to push a narrative that the 1.5 million users found makes Steam one of the most “dangerous” platforms on the planet. Unsurprisingly, such demagoguery has found support with Senator Mark Warner who immediately took it upon himself to send a letter addressed to Gabe Newell citing the ADL’s findings which he announced on his X account.
Within the letter Senator Warner recites the various statistics that the ADL released and questioned “how committed Valve is to effectively implement and enforce Valve’s own, self-created Conduct Policy for its users…” Warner then went on to threaten Newell with further scrutiny from the federal government that, he believes, would have an impact on holiday sales stating,
“As Black Friday and the holiday buying season approaches, the American public should know that not only is Steam an unsafe place for teens and young adults to purchase and play online games, but also that, absent a change in Valve’s approach to user moderation and the type of behavior that it welcomes on its platform, Steam is playing a clear role in allowing harmful ideologies to spread and take root among the next generation.
Valve must bring its content moderation practices in line with industry standards or face more intense scrutiny from the federal government for its complicity in allowing hate groups to congregate and engage in activities that undoubtedly puts Americans at risk.”
What follows after the veiled threat is a list of questions that Warner demanded must be answered by December 13, 2024. The questions range from Valve providing its own definitions of terms and behaviors from the company’s own conduct policy to providing the number of allegations that were reported and received by Valve from users.
However, the questions became more invasive such as demanding Valve provide the payment methods for unique user accounts that were the recipient of punitive or corrective actions by Valve. Warner also demands that Valve disclose the number of moderators who are in-house Valve employees, are contracted by Valve, and whether or not the system utilizes AI-content moderation.
Warner goes on to ask what steps Valve will take to “prevent, monitor, and mitigate” such content and if company will commit to ensuring Steam will “meaningfully” curb hateful content in addition to white supremacy, terrorism, antisemitism, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, and Nazi content by November 15, 2025.
This is not the first time a politician has targeted Valve and its Steam platform. Back in 2022, Democrat Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire sent a letter to Valve calling it out over the proliferation of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups on Steam. Senator Hassan pointed out similar instances that the ADL parroted in its recent reports and, like Warner, demanded that Valve answer questions by a set date.
Prior to that, video game media outlets have repeatedly focused on Valve’s moderation and actions towards dealing with hateful groups and content on Steam. In 2018, another media blitz occurred involving sites such as PC Gamer, worried that Alex Jones’s InfoWars might set up on Steam, talked about how the platform has a “hate group problem.” Meanwhile sites such as Ars Technica lambasted Valve for not “taking sides” when it comes to curation of the platform declaring that the Half-Life developer “implicitly endorses vile content.”
When it comes to free speech, the Federal government and Leftist mainstream media have no problems curbing and violating the free speech of American citizens. The government threatened and coerced social media platforms to give the government access to users’ data while also allowing the government to dictate who should be banned, what can or cannot be discussed, and other fascistic actions for the sake of manipulation and censored content. One only has to look at Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg who testified to know that the Biden administration pressured the company to censor anything having to do with Covid-19.
The actions of Senators Maggie Hassan and Mark Warner are not surprising as it is primarily Democrats who have targeted social media platforms in order to control what is said, discussed, and pushed. Nor is it surprising that video game outlets and journalists are, once again, attacking Valve’s Steam platform for easy clicks and pushing a similar agenda.
Both Leftist politicians and journalists ignore the fact that Valve does tend to take care of such matters. But, whether such actions are timely or not and effective or not, it doesn’t matter to these politicians and the Leftist, biased games journalists.
Eventually, Valve will deal with it, such people will find a way to work around it, and this cat-and-mouse cycle will continue on. Let the baby fascists cry about a less than 1% issue on Steam. Just remember who these politicians are when it comes to voting them out of office and the video game outlets who try to censor the gaming industry who don’t deserve you giving them the traffic they need for their ad revenue.
Valve will take care of the minority of hate-filled extremists.. Meanwhile, there are other more pressing issues that the House of Gordon Freeman should deal with. Issues such as game ownership, third-party requirements, labeling developers and games as Chinese-owned and developed, or finishing Half-Life 3.
Author’s Note: Support this site by donating via Paypal or even checking out our merchandise on RedBubble where you can find designs that cater to writers and readers. Money donated and
raised goes into paying for this website and equipment.
Interested in posting this article, or another article, on your website? Check out our prices to make that happen – https://tinyurl.com/mrxa56pp
