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You might say we're all living inside a ruinous waking nightmare that spawned from the dream of Web 2.0.
Don't get me wrong: It was a beautiful dream.
Web 2.0. We are all of us producers. With our blogs and our comments and our tweets and our YouTube channels we will democratise content and the algorithms -- those glorious algorithms -- will aid in the process. We will upvote and favourite and like and the wheat will be separated from the chaff.
Magic.
I think we can all agree that Web 2.0 didn't quite work as advertised.
It gave us Minecraft. It gave us Wikipedia, collaborative spaces, online tools. But it also gave us Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Gamergate, incels, toxic communities, Logan Paul wandering into a suicide forest. It gave us Twitter bullying, Kelly Marie Tran harassment campaigns on Instagram.
It gave us terrible, opportunistic video games about school shootings.
Wednesday, after yanking Active Shooter, a video game where you play as a high school shooter, from its Steam store, Valve made an announcement. In a blog titled "Who gets to be on the Steam Store" Valve discussed the steps it's taking to prevent a video game like Active Shooter from making it to the Steam store in the future.
Its solution is about as Web 2.0 as it gets.
"[W]e've decided," wrote Valve, "that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling."
"Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see."
In 2018, at this current moment, it seems like a decision out of time. An old-fashioned solution to a problem that literally every single platform on the internet is currently trying to solve. We live in a world where Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are in the process of trying to actively take responsibility for the content produced and posted on their platforms.
Meanwhile, Valve is busy trying to abdicate that responsibility.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday June 09 2018, @11:58PM (4 children)
I disagree.
No, that is wrong. First, it doesn't need to be a 100% or all possible markets to count as censorship. For example, forcing library patrons to read a book only in a particular room would be an act of censorship even though the book's overall market isn't affected and people aren't actually being prohibited, even in the library, from reading the book. Suppression counts even if it is partial.
Second, censorship is not just "stopping the game company". Any restriction on availability of a game due to its content is censorship whether or not the censor bears any sort of ill will to the originator of the content.
Back at you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ilPapa on Sunday June 10 2018, @05:57AM (3 children)
So, what you're saying is that if Breitbart doesn't allow me to post my pro-Socialist column daily on their website that they're censoring me?
Do you have any inkling of the extent of your stupidity?
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:20AM (2 children)
Why would you have an expectation that your post would end up on their website otherwise? Valve has pretty low hurdles for game publishing once you get past the censored subjects. Breibart has a very restrictive conditions on what they public even once you get past the ideological bias.
I do. You apparently do not.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Monday June 11 2018, @06:31AM (1 child)
But you're calling those restrictive conditions "censorship" when Valve does it, so why isn't it censorship when Breitbart does it?
Weren't you just saying, "Suppression counts even if it is partial." So are you OK with Breitbart's suppression of left-wing thought?
This is why the First Amendment is clear on "congress shall make no law". Because people are allowed to publish what they want, but on their own dime. And when you get into making the definition of censorship all mushy by including private individuals or organizations, you end up devaluing the entire concept of free speech.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 11 2018, @09:38PM
I already stated why. Read the post. Even slavishly following the Breibart ideology (and hence, removing the ideological aspect as a reason for rejection) doesn't guarantee you'll see your words in print. While the non-ideological aspects of the Valve system are minimal and not much of a restriction.
Yes, that is what I said. We call it "bias" not "censorship".
I didn't say it was a First Amendment issue though it can be such. A more likely legal matter is whether the system falsely presented itself as being without significant censorship to get public buy-in and then did a switch-and-bait.
It can also be a First Amendment issue, if this censorship is being done at the behest of the US federal government or the various state and local governments (which are also beholden to the First Amendment), particularly, if being responsive to government requests results in better treatment by the government.