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
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.