Schadrach

(so far?) avoided falling off the right wing conspiracy cliff

People’s views typically tend to move slowly but what’s the current progressive position tends to move much faster, so if he’s young enough he’ll probably eventually fall off the progressive treadmill.

Another Chinese-owned social media.

Doesn’t that mean it’s just law enforcement noticing it exists and applying the law that bans TikTok away from also being banned?

The implication is that someone is going to come off as a likely mark and for example get invited into a private user group with people “joking” with things like the Happy Merchant or being ridiculously over the top in a way that’s hard to take seriously to ease people in to taking white supremacist ideas seriously.

Ever seen the South Park episode about the Passion of the Christ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_the_Jew)? The idea is basically that that is constantly happening online anywhere it’s not sufficiently prevented.

The ADL considers Pepe a hate symbol, which I agree with is daft but that’s kind of key to their data and they are considered experts in the field by most. They scanned Steam with some automated tool looking for hate symbol images, came up with like a million hate symbols detected. If something contained more than one detected hate symbol, it got counted as however many hate symbols the tool detected (so for example Pepe saluting a swastika would count as a Pepe and a swastika).

Almost 55% of those were Pepe. The next highest was the swastika at 9%. A literal majority of hate symbols they detected with that tool were Pepes, at more than 5 times the rate of the next most common symbol. It’s literally included to make the problem bigger in the hopes that most readers either won’t look that deep or won’t know what Pepe is.

EDIT: Another fun one is if you go look at their hate symbol index, about an eighth of two digit numbers are either hate symbols or part of a hate symbol.

I am a big GOG enjoyer myself, but when I need to use steam for anything, I have never encountered such content.

You’ve never seen a Pepe meme on Steam? I’m not kidding there either - if you dig into that ADL link and follow it to the research, they have a list of top extremist and hateful symbols on Steam and the swastika is number 2 at 9 percent of detected symbols. #1, representing something like 55% of extremist and hateful symbols their automated detector found on Steam was Pepe.

Perhaps there is such content in private or otherwise not very visible spaces (such as user profiles), where they will not get reported, but that is true for any site with user content. I call BS on this being an issue.

If you dig into their research, it’s mostly private user groups and profiles. Game discussion pages are moderated by their respective devs or whoever the devs appoint but user groups are moderated by their owner/appointees and user profile pages aren’t really moderated at all unless you’re doing something actually illegal in the US.

So unless you go looking at the user profile pages of white supremacists, or go searching for white supremacist user groups you won’t run into much of it.