Collective Shout Provokes New Steam Censorship Rules
Shortly after Steam’s new moderation guidelines went live, Australian anti-porn activist group Collective Shout claimed responsibility. Collective Shout has cited payment processors (such as PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa) as primary targets in their campaign, which pairs with Valve’s confirmation that pressure from these payment processors played a role in their decision to ramp up content moderation.
Collective Shout co-founder Melinda Tankard Reist followed up with an inflammatory Twitter post, in which she referred to her detractors as “porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists”. It is difficult to read this statement and imagine it comes from someone who carries the best interests of the video game community at heart.
Collective Shout is a self-described feminist non-partisan organization, but has alleged ties with anti-trans and conservative organizations. The group has developed a reputation as a sort of puritan crusade that targets everything from Detroit: Become Human to Tyler, the Creator.
PCgamer article
Collective Shout, an Australian anti-pornography group, has claimed credit for Steam’s recent removal of a large number of sexually explicit games and new, stricter moderation guidelines regarding such material. In a statement to PC Gamer, Valve cited pressure from payment processors like credit card companies and Paypal for the move, while Collective Shout touted its open letter and consumer campaign targeting payment processors for inciting that pressure.
This was first reported by Waypoint, which has since pulled its two articles on the subject without explanation. The articles’ author, Ana Valens, has alleged that Vice’s parent company, Savage Ventures, removed the articles due to concerns over their controversial content rather than any error in the reporting.
Collective Shout began in 2009, co-founded by self-described “pro-life feminist” Melinda Tankard Reist. Collective Shout describes itself as “A grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualization of girls in media, advertising, and popular culture”. To date, it has been involved in:
- Unsuccessful efforts to ban Snoop Dogg and Eminem from Australia.
- A successful 2015 campaign to prevent Tyler the Creator from touring Australia.
- A successful 2015 campaign to pressure Target and Kmart to stop selling Grand Theft Auto 5 in Australia.
- A petition to ban the game No Mercy from sale, which ultimately led to the developers pulling it from Steam.
- An unsuccessful petition to ban Detroit: Become Human from sale in Australia
I went to look at the tweet from that woman, and half the replies are calling her a leftist.
Incredible political analysis by gamer Chuds.
Saw a screenshot of “proof” that they were leftists:
One of the Collective Shout members posting years ago in support the Liberal Party.
…which is the major right wing party of Australia.
They’re anti abortion and have support from anti-LGBT church leaders, Swerfs and Terfs.
*one of the major right wing parties of Australia (Labor is also right wing)
rightwing feminists claim the label and most people don’t know the difference
A shocking number of Americans/Westerners just casually accept that leftist/socialist is shorthand for “evil”. Its definitely gotten better. To the point people like my dad are at least a bit slower to spout hitlerite thought.
That is assuming that this isn’t the average semi-aware rightie that purposefully does this crap.
Oh ok it all makes sense now, the credit card companies did this because there is this far right wing TERF organisation with ties to powerful Australian parties starting some puritanical moral panic against porn games as a means to encourage right wing censorship on steam. The card companies will listen because they’re scared of pissing off such powerful people who are ideologically aligned with the zeitgeist and can therefore do a lot of damage if they really ramp up their moral panic.
deleted by creator
Oh hey cool, if this ends up causing me to lose my job and I end up homeless, not only do I know who to blame, but they even live in the same country as me. There’s absolutely nothing I can do about that information though.
Saying they claimed responsibility for this makes it feel like the way we talk about terrorist groups after some shit goes down
Something good could come out of this.
When Valve got spooked by the Windows app store they responded by funding Proton, making SteamOS and the Steamdeck and having Steam start fully supporting linux.
Now the credit card duopoly is tightening it’s grip Valve might be getting nervous and they have already shown a willingness to experiment with other funding sources. Steam throwing it’s weight behind other payment processors could do a lot to help mainstream alternatives.
monkey paw curls Valve will allow purchasing games using crypto
Not unless they have a different system from the last time they tried it. I don’t have the article on hand ATM but something like 50% of crypto transactions were fraudulent. Which is also the sort of thing I would expect from crypto users
found the link several hours later
As a crypto user, I don’t even know how to send currency that I don’t actually have.
why can’t steam just like, have its own credit card processing service
I think a more realistic scenario is that Valve finally starts doing their job and hiring content moderators to appease the payment processors and keep off any actually egregious content, per their new policy. I fully believe that it would not have gotten to this point if Valve took even an ounce of responsibility and policed their own store and community pages. They left the gates open for this group to worm their way in by using the cover of removing disgusting gooner games nobody cares about that shouldn’t have been there to begin with. And because Valve is the largest storefront for games, that allowed this group to leapfrog to other smaller platforms that suffer because of Valve’s negligence.
They left the gates open for this group to worm their way in
I don’t buy this, considering the recent history of using anti-porn levers as anti-LGBTQ levers, I think this would’ve happened either way.
It’s possible with how rabid these groups are already, but I don’t think Valve has done anyone any favors with their ‘open platform’ strategy. I think it’s a version of the Nazi bar where they’ve allowed themselves to become the targets of and used by bad faith actors by platforming some of the worst examples those groups use to start their campaigns and doing essentially 0 moderation other than ‘is this illegal?’. If it was just one game, like for example Hatred, then they wouldn’t have as much leverage. But they can say “look at these THOUSANDS of games” and it’s a lot easier to catch stuff like LGBTQ+ content in that wide net.
Ah, yes, let’s just pre-emptively censor everything to appease the right-wing lunatics who crave a return to the American 1950s that exists only in their fucking minds, to the good old day of God and Family and Women in their Proper Place and No Queers and No Blacks and No Hispanics and No Autists and No Mentally Ill and No Homeless only Good White Christian Families doing Good White Christian things.
The cisheteropatriarchy is never going to accept people who do not adhere to it’s unachievable horrendous norms, no matter how clean and pure and pre-censored everything is. Pornographic material is always the canary in the fucking coal mine, and this was a direct attack on literally the least harmful form of pornographic material that has none of the fucking issues with exploitation and coercion as live-action porn - nobody is hurt by pornographic video games! People like you just refuse to give up the position of Morality Police making sure that all artistic and cultural products stay within your lanes of ‘culturally acceptable’ - you fundamentally agree with fascists like these people, you just nitpick the details.
you fundamentally agree with fascists like these people, you just nitpick the details.
I think that a million versions of “Sex with Hitler” add zero value to the platform or humanity as a whole, while making things like this easier to accomplish. That’s all. I’m not anti-porn (especially drawn/written) on principle.
EDIT: I think Valve overall has a bad track record of doing any effort to protect any community on their platforms (including developers) due to their “no moderation” stance. We can disagree that removing a lot of the porn slop on the platform would have helped, but ultimately I think they don’t do enough to protect people using their services, and part of that is content moderation (to not invite groups like this to target them for low hanging fruit) and community moderation (to not allow them to speak), which literally every other platform does to some capacity, even here.
Valve has basically a monopoly on online game sales, it would be silly of them to just capitulate without trying something
The payment processors have a monopoly on moving money. Which is much, much, much, much more powerful. Valve is an ant compared to them. Their alternatives are crypto (big hit in revenues, most likely their crown gets taken by another game storefront as most people don’t want the additional KYC hassle of opening a crypto account, doing a face-scan, submitting 5 forms of ID and then dealing with the nonsense of an intermediary currency like carnival tokens to buy games, they -might- be able to just do it for objectionable games but the payment processors might also say not good enough), asking people to mail in cash (lol), or gift-cards sold through retail channels.
Basically 100/100 times Valve or any other for-profit company in this position is going to buckle and submit because all the other options hit them in the wallet way too hard.
FUCK COLLECTIVE SHOUT. YOUR KIDS LOOKING AT PORN IS YOUR PROBLEM, GO FIX IT YOURSELF.
Ironic how the exact same people who ran a crusade against feminism ten years ago by claiming to fight for the right to have big booba in games are the same people who want to take the big booba vidya away and consider feminists to be their enemy yet again for promoting “unchristian removed”
And they’re winning the culture wars both times
It’s two entirely different groups of CHUDs though. The gooner CHUDs want every woman to be degraded and just exist as big booba waifus in video games, and the puritanical CHUDs want every woman to be chained and bound and to just be her husband’s property. The two can form alliances sometimes, because they both want women to suffer, but at the end of the day, they do have disagreements on how that suffering should look.
Gooner game makers rapidly switching back to making 18+ Flash games on Newgrounds for ad revenue (the ads are all for Evony or Snorg Tees)
porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists
bars
MF DOOM line energy
the same corporations tryna ban the devil’s lettuces
I played Like a Dragon, and if there’s one thing Bleach Japan taught me it’s that this group is obviously
spoilers for Yakuza: Like A Dragon
a front for a rival Yakuza faction trying to destroy my secret dad’s legacy and consolidate power
Steam is now completely infested with disgusting porn games. I hope this does not target stuff that’s 18+ but cool, like baldur’s gate 3.
This will 100% be used as a cudgel against media with queer representation more than all the gooner stuff
It already been use for that plus indie horror games like mouthwashing for example
Yeah, you’re right. These people always use this language as a cover so they go “heh, :smuglord: so you agree the LGBT+ community is that”.
They’re disgusting people.
That’s the real intention behind all this. They want to legally discriminate against LGBTQ+ people without saying so out loud. They can also spread queerphobia by conflating trans people with pedophiles who “groom children” before moving on to do the same to bisexual/homosexual people.
Yeah… You’re right, unfortunately
You do realise that the *type of people spearheading this censorship operation are those who organise TERF protests attended by neo nazis and harass trans people on the street in major australian cities right?
I did not, in fact, realize that. That is fucking awful. As much as i don’t want to see boobs simulator 3000 in steam, I want those people to go fuck themselves. I hadn’t noticed the “pro-life feminist shit” oh no
Yeah it seems the only reason why they were successful at all is because they’re backed by powerful right wing groups, both TERFs and Christcucks, its insane, they’re powerful enough to get articles pulled from Vice, have a read of this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist
Yeah sorry, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. If ‘sex with Hitler 2’ is taken down, it’s a short path to BG3 and whatever else that features any sort of sexual themes are taken down too.
Better stand and link arms together with the gooners if you want cool and creative games to be made in the future
18+ but cool, like baldur’s gate 3.
i think i can count on one hand the number of games that have sex/sexy content but are actually also games
Hunie Pop is actually a really good match-3 game that just happens to have booba
On one hand its been a ritual for me and my friends to laugh at the often awful sometimes just funny shit that gets put on the front page of the biggest gaming platform.
On the other, holy shit there does need to be censorship.
If getting rid of “give me money for saying the 14 words” would get rid of “out of respect, I won’t repeat even the tame names of the average gooner game”… I guess I’d take it. I’d mourn for a peak into the funny part of human sexuality. But I think I’d survive.
Yeah but censorship coming from a bunch of right wing TERFs? Really? They won’t get rid of the nazi shit or the more insidious actual American military propaganda that contributes to things like manufacturing consent for genocide. This is bad.
Tbh, the porn games have better graphics and gameplay than a lot of AAA titles.
