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
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.
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.