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Is there a crisis of Holocaust revisionism in video games? ADL certainly thinks so and publicly calls out Fortnite along with Call of Duty for being insufficiently tough on their gamers. While I generally speaking have a low opinion of mass-market video games, I'm surprised how politicised games are these days. When I was young, there was total freedom to name yourself whatever and say anything you wanted. I want kids' innocent hobbies to remain that way, without getting the ADL-sponsored Holocaust triggers and censorships baked into games. Is that too much to ask?
It reminds me of the brouhaha over transexuals in the latest Harry Potter game. JK Rowling's stance is well-known but the devs couldn't resist smacking gamers over the head with pro-trans content. If Holocaust denial is a concern, will we soon see Anne Frank adventure games for kids to play (whether they want it or not)?
I'm genuinely getting worried (even if in a concern-trolly way) that the ADL is sending itself down the PETA path with stuff like this. I'm not Jewish, but I imagine many Jews really don't need an organization like the ADL succumbing to the toxoplasma incentive gradient. I guess to some people, though, it might be too late and they're already well down that slope.
I mean, come on, over Fortnite of all things?
For what it's worth I already considered the ADL and PETA to be birds of a feather. There's some real and sensible point behind both of them. And then there's the looney hyperbolic extremism they both show.
To reply to both you and @The_Nybbler, I'd say that the difference is that Jewish people, insofar as they are genuinely concerned about a resurgence of anti-Semitism, really can't afford the ADL claiming to represent them while also beclowning itself in the eyes of the wider society. PETA making vegans/vegetarians/animal lovers/etc. look bad is one thing, ADL making Jews look bad is a lot more worrying.
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Does the ADL really need Jews, though? As long as they can credibly speak for Jews, they have power, whether actual Jews like them or not.
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Based on their report card, they seem to want the following.
Explicitly don't allow anyone to deny genocides (they mention Youtube's policy as an example, which is not centered on the Holocaust)
Have faster responses on flagged content (tweet, video, etc.)
Inform the user why they were banned w.r.t genocide denial.
Respond to even non-trusted flaggers faster and more often.
I'm tempted to say that this isn't necessarily new, most explicit anti-Semitism falls under existing enforcement against bad behavior anyways. I 100% support those rules, I don't care if someone calls another person a kike or a nigger, you get the boot to your face regardless.
But the ADL is, unsurprisingly, trying to wall off any discussion of the Holocaust or genocides altogether, unless you're explicitly condemning people who question the official narrative. I have no new comments to say, this argument between freedom of speech and creating safer online platforms/communities has been hashed out and litigated so often that it's just boring.
If anything, the ADL has no idea just how expensive moderation is. They're certainly not offering money to get it done, just demanding it so. There's a reason algorithms are used, and one of them is that paying humans to moderate your stuff is slow and expensive compared to algorithms that sift through data.
You're sure? If denial of any genocide is against the rules, a lot of accounts with names like NaggerStomper1488 are going to make sure people are aware that saying White Genocide isn't happening is a banworthy offence.
I support the rules against the use of slurs as insults directed at people, yes. It's certainly possible for the context to vindicate an accusation of bigotry (maybe people really are on the mention side of the use-mention distinction), but people can, if they act in good-faith, distinguish between the two.
As for the point about genocide, it's probably not going to happen the way you think. Progressives aren't rules-lawyer bots, and they can correctly determine that in almost every case, the person making a White Genocide argument is not some philosopher making a point about the meaning of those words, but an anti-progressive at the least and outright racist at worse. Both of those tend to have similar rhetoric on this topic.
It's a video game chat, not themotte, and the quality and motivations likewise differ in predictable ways.
I don't actually think this is true. Outside of the Motte and 4chan most of my internet posting is harassment and trolling, and only the most nakedly obvious and unsubtle trolls get identified or pointed out. If you decide to troll by being obnoxiously left-wing/woke then you can get away with murder most of the time.
That said I think I misunderstood your post - when you said "I 100% support those rules", did you mean the rules proposed by the ADL or "existing enforcement against bad behavior anyways"?
The existing rules.
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Yeah but once they establish these norms they will become tools to ban even more content. "You endorse the anti-Semitic conspiracy about George Soros?" "You are opposed to globalists?" And then criticizing Kamala Harris in the right way will count as "genocide denial".
Where would they expand to? Most of the stuff they go after seems fairly Jewish-centric anyways. The globalists meme has been around for a while, have they condemned that one too?
Yes, at length and escalating from treating it as context-dependent around to becoming presumptively 'hateful' and/or antisemitic in more recent years.
I can provide examples of older stuff that's not really tied to Jewish issues, or more recent willingness to lump actual Nazis and annoying trolls in a pile, but this seems like about as distilled evidence as possible (context here). The question is not whether the ADL will expand past its traditional focus on attacks against Jewish people, or even if once doing so it will get any meaningful traction; it has already extracted major policy wins against one of the best-known and most-played video games on the planet, where even by its own metrics "Hate speech largely targeted sexuality (e.g. f*g homo) and gender (e.g. b*tch)."
This isn't to debate whether these are good policy decisions individually, or to discuss whether ADL's adventurism is necessarily wrong or even bad as a policy matter. But for all I might have once had high hopes that a principled 'except for Nazis, because fuck Nazis' exception might be possible -- there was a day where RPGnet moderators carefully evaluated the difference between UKIP and BNP before they slide right down the slope to this -- I'm very skeptical than any of the extant groups with power could or even wants to try.
Good to know, I don't follow the ADL. Thanks for the links, I'll admit I was wrong about the "globalists" point.
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But how far back are we talking, though? I remember when I was a fresh young teen gamer getting into multiplayer games and I found out that Team Fortress 2's neat feature of using your Steam name for your in-game name was far from universal--in older multiplayer games, including Valve's own Counter-Strike: Source, you had to manually set your name from a default. No Steam account synchronization, and if you just reinstalled, you better hope you remember how many Xes were in your sick l33t gamer name.
I hear Tribes 2(?) did have a weak sort of anti-piracy measure where, if your name matched a default name that was coded into a certain pirated version of it, it would auto-kick you, but I suspect filters were basically the most you had for multiplayer games in an age before Steam's utter dominance of the PC space.
It was before my time, but I'm pretty sure Ultima Online solely filtered profanity on the client side, with moderator decisions supposed to be focused on harassment in the traditional 'doing it after being asked to stop' rather than language directly.
In UO the client side profanity filter was so simplistic that enabling it display "Mass Dispel" as "M*** Dispel". It would actually display grawlix instead of stars.
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Wow, the ADL is starting a beef on Twitter. I can’t believe Elon is letting them get away with it.
You are borrowing trouble, comrade. I’d say to let me know when Epic Games bows to this sort of pressure, but I don’t actually care. It’s their ecosystem. Kids can hang out and play couch multiplayer if they want to call each other faggots.
Couch multiplayer is absent from like, most games nowadays. And you'd still have to be always-online, probably.
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