Valve Removes Over 100 Steam Tributes To Suspected New Zealand Shooter
http://tinyurl.com/yy7gnt32
The gaming platform Steam has cracked down on over 100 profiles memorializing
the suspected shooter behind today’s tragic mosque shooting in New Zealand,
which claimed the lives of 49 people.
Until shortly before this article’s publication, dozens of users of the PC
gaming service were blatantly offering tribute to the alleged writer behind a
white supremacist manifesto that takes responsibility for the New Zealand
shooting. These profiles tended to appropriate the suspected killer’s name
and image, the most common of which appears to be a screenshot from a
Facebook livestream of the shooting. One profile displays a GIF of the attack
while others offer praise for his actions or refer to him as “Kebab Remover”
or a “saint” or “hero.”
Early this morning, 66 profiles claimed the alleged shooter’s name, and in
just three hours, that number inflated to over 100. Hours after Kotaku
reached out to Steam for comment, however, the alleged shooter’s name
disappeared from those profiles’ main pages, but still remains under a list
of previous aliases. Still, new ones are appearing.
As of this article’s publication, there are just two users claiming or
emulating the name of the suspected killer on both Facebook and Twitter.
In addition to nearly 100 pages that referred to or venerated the suspected
New Zealand shooter, hundreds of pages continue to nod toward past mass
shooters including perpetrators of massacres in Charleston, Isla Vista and
Parkland and of the 2011 mass killing in Norway. These profiles also
appropriate these terrorists’ names and images, sometimes their mugshots or
press images from their trial. Many have been live for months or years. 45
profiles referencing the Charleston shooter’s name remain live, including
four created near the date of the 2015 attack.
“It’s very hard to speculate about why people do things on the internet.
Internet culture tends to be steeped in irony and satire,” said Alice
Marwick, an assistant professor of communications at UNC Chapel Hill, where
she studies extremist content on social media. “With that being said, a lot
of the time this kind of irony and satire does cloak genuine hatred. . . I
think when people take on the mantle of these people, yes, they could be
ironic or edgelords, but even if you’re not emulating their actions, you’re
emulating their belief system.”
For years, hate groups fostering Nazis and white supremacists have thrived on
Steam, VICE Motherboard reported in 2017. Just one year later, The Center for
Investigative Reporting revealed that Steam acted as home for 173 groups “
that blatantly venerate past school shooters,” including some described as “
A group for all my fellow shooters” and “School Shooters are Heroes.”
Valve, the company behind Steam, has traditionally taken a hands-off approach
toward moderating the content of games, groups and users’ pages that their
platform hosts, which is what makes today’s moderation effort noteworthy.
Yet Kotaku reported late 2018 that Steam was quietly removing some of the
hate groups hosted on it. “Various parts of the Steam Community are
moderated by a combination of official Valve staff, community moderators, and
representatives of the game developers and publishers,” Steam’s moderation
document reads. As of earlier this year, Steam hosted 90 million monthly users
—a behemoth moderation task.
Public veneration for mass shooters contributes to the misguided and deeply
demented “hero” narrative that helps spawn them, be it ironic or sincere.
Additional reporting contributed by Dhruv Mehrotra.
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简单来说，Steam上出现了不少对新西兰枪手致敬的文章内容。
还有尊称他为 卡巴清除者 (Kebab Remover) 、圣徒或英雄。
除此之外还有致敬过去大屠杀枪手的文章也出现了。
其实Steam做为一个有9000万用户的社区，过去早就有纳粹和白人至上主义社群在上面发
展，而且数量不少。
而Valve以往其实不会过度干涉玩家行为。
但在2018年末时Valve就开始针对这些仇恨团体进行审查了，看来Steam很难再保持原本的
不干涉做法了。