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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)?
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.
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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