Itch.io is shadowbanning or deleting NSFW and LGBTQ content

[Theory of Games]

Hard to avoid politics with this one

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Hard to avoid politics with this one

Even if one does not believe, like I do believe, that hobbies and art are inherently political, politics ptetty much forced themselves upon our hobbies here.

 

[Theory of Games]

Even if one does not believe, like I do believe, that hobbies and art are inherently political, politics ptetty much forced themselves upon our hobbies here.

My point is if we can't discuss politics, then we can't engage THIS particular topic fully ....

 

[MGibster]

At some point, it's entirely possible for the products/services of a private enterprise—or even a small group of private enterprises—to become so ubiquitous in the functions/transactions of everyday life that they're essentially acting as a de facto public utility. At that point, the government has not only the right but the obligation to step in and stop them from arbitrarily deciding who can use them and/or what they can use them for.

I don't know if they still do, but Walmart used to refuse to sell albums with the Parental Advisory stickers on them. They'd sell the clean version of the album, but not the regular version, and this was back when Walmart was the largest music retailer in the United States, so it really affected how well an album might sell. At least here in the United States, where we have a very strong right to freely associate with whom we wish, it's going to be difficult to force companies to work with anyone they don't want to work with. At least aside from discriminatory reasons based on race, skin color, national origin, veteran status, religion, gender, etc., etc.

You could make a good case that discrimination based on sexual orientation is gender discrimination, that's been the case in employment discrimination cases here in the US, but that's probably not going to apply to pornography. Of course that's only here in the United States, how the European Union decides to handle things is up to them. I'm personally not too keen on automatically lumping LGBTQ stuff with pornography.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

No, companies do not have an absolute right to choose who they do business with.

Yup. Governments exist above companies for a reason. We are not (yet) a cyberpunk corporation-run dystopia. A lot of people, especially certain billionaires (not just the one) are absolutely pushing incredibly hard to become that, but we're not that. Regulation of companies exists for good reason, as much as countless politicians and too-rich idiots over the last forty years have lied and lied and lied (and continue to do so) that it doesn't and just "stifles business" (something that's trivially and obviously false).

And frankly it's past time that Mastercard, Visa, and companies like them were severely regulated. In the EU and UK we already significantly regulate their ability to charge outrageous fees, which, ironically, has actually helped them and increased vendor and consumer acceptance (literally these companies don't even know what's good for them! They're blinded by their own staggering short-term-ist greed and total cowardice), and now they're showing it's time to regulate them to prevent them picking and choosing who they work with on a political or moral basis, or rather, an absolute cowardice basis, in that the moment a tiny group of prats threatens them with "bad press" (despite the fact that this likely wouldn't have even made national news in Australia, let alone anywhere else), they immediately cave.

They're too important to how our society functions, and they've forgotten the rule that if you become that important, then you're effectively a public utility, and thus must be strictly regulated and controlled.

As I have said, already a number of LGBTQ+ creators have confirmed to have their work affected. A lot of games I support or want to buy are LGBTQ+ or from LGBTQ+ creators. It is disengenious to try to label anyone opposing this as just being in it for porn. Again, one of games they're trying to take down from Steam is Detroid: Become Human, a mainstream game, to claim this is jsut about porn is at best ignorant.

Indeed. The activist group (and they're far from the only one - various extremist groups in the US have done the same. The Aussie one is unusual in that it's claiming (rather disingenuously and frankly in bad faith) to be ideologically centre-left yet has viewpoints literally identical to groups which claim to be extreme right-wing and claim religion as the source of their views (also arguably in bad faith) - just showing how pointless such labels can be. The fact is, regardless of whether a group claims Germaine Greer or Yahweh or Jordan Peterson as the source of their opinions, they're all just extremist bigots who want to drive LGBTQ+ people, all human sexuality, and basically anything that wouldn't fit on a US 1950s sitcom (and some stuff that would, even!) from any legal space, regardless of how well-protected it is.

And the one of the reason these groups think (perhaps correctly) that they can get away with enforcing their weird extremist morality on the rest of us is the total and abject failure of English-speaking politicians to stand up for trans people in the face of hideous campaigns against them by tiny numbers of extremely loud and well-funded people. It's a classic case of "First they came for..." and in this case it was the trans people. I don't know why our current breeds of politicians are so completely spineless on this, but it's pretty shocking, especially given public opinion is demonstrably not with them, and it's absolutely emboldening groups like this.

 

[Divine2021]

The amount of what are clearly rape and “child porn disguised as anime girls” on Steam is astounding. I’m not sure I want to defend them, or attack policies to deplatform them.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Ah, it looks like Collective Shout has partnered with the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). To avoid politics, I'll let you google them and form your own opinions on the "righteousness" of their agenda. I'm getting flashbacks of the Satanic Panic from the 80s.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Is LGBTQ+ material being blocked because it's LGBTQ+, or is just that some of it is also being considered NSFW?

I don't know how one would identify content as LGBTQ+...or as heteronormative, either...without there being some element of sexuality in it. In other words, if all anybody is doing is fighting monsters and taking their stuff, what would identify it as LGBTQ+? So I wouldn't be surprised if a high percentage of LGBTQ+ content gets flagged as NSFW, compared to a random sampling of content.

However, I also wouldn't be surprised if the sort of people who go out of their way to flag NSFW content have different reactions to the same activity depending upon whether or not it's heteronormative.

 

[Staffan]

The amount of what are clearly rape and “child porn disguised as anime girls” on Steam is astounding. I’m not sure I want to defend them, or attack policies to deplatform them.

I see your point, but the correct avenue to attack that would be to try to influence Steam to change their policies, not to influence Mastercard and VISA whose job is to enable people to pay for things they want to buy. In the long run, this is the kind of thing that will influence platforms to accept crypto payments and customers to use crypto payments, and crypto is bad-and-evil in and of itself.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Is LGBTQ+ material being blocked because it's LGBTQ+, or is just that some of it is also being considered NSFW?

I would like to see actual examples of what's happening, but because NCOSE and Collective Shout are involved, it would be unsurprising to see them banned just because they have LGBT representation in the product.