@zarf Today’s article: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games from Steam | PC Gamer
That just has the quote I referred to. As @jkj_yukio noted news publications are widely interpreting it that way, but it is in fact an interpretation.
Hopefully full details come out but it seems unlikely given how measured Steam’s statement is.
@tvil Itch has essentially relied on crowdsourced reports (and the DMCA takedown system) to moderate its catalogue, and is not rigged for doing something like this with any sort of granularity. They’ll probably have to scale up now (unless this situation sinks them instead).
Fair, but they clearly have a plan, which is to put the burden on users, making them sign off on saying that their content complies with credit card processors’ requirements.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I’m under the impression that it’s fairly standard. They should have done this before a crisis.
Ultimately, the actual, active moderation Itch should have to do is minimal. Better self-moderation is enough.
It would probably still be better if nobody had to do any of this of course, given how small-scale the matter ultimately is and the fact that the existing policies mostly covered things.
@Monsieur.HUT There is no ideological intentionality behind all this
Collective Shout has an ideology, but it’s a mixed one.
Itch io’s decision, though, is one that it specifically chose under duress, and not due to the ideological reasons its users are claiming.
I guess someone could argue that Collective Shout targeted Itch io in particular knowing it has more LGBT content than usual and would be unable to handle the issue, and therefore intended Itch’s overresponse.
However, since Collective Shout members seem to be in “dog has caught car” mode, going private on LinkedIn etc., that probably wasn’t the intention.
Politics isn’t a binary nor even a straight line, and its entirely possible for people who disagree on 9 out of 10 issues to still be natural allies on the 1 out of 10 issues they agree on, even if their reasons are completely different
That seems to be the case here. I wonder if Collective Shout, given its unexpected fame, will get rid of its current members and take on more neutral leaders rather than just politically varied ones.
The current leaders seem to be politically vocal beyond the scope of the group. I’m not going to go digging into their social media, and I don’t know exactly how inflammatory/aggressive/hateful they are, but I assume they’re pretty bad at a glance and based on second-hand reports.
However, the group itself seems to be pretty consistent on the issues they’re targeting (rape, incest, and child abuse).
Notably they had Andrew Tate’s podcast removed from SoundCloud and Spotify, an example of targeting far-right content. If it wasn’t for the Itch io takedown, this group would be a lot more sympathetic to a lot of people.