Applying moderation and reacting to legitimate complaints in time would have prevented pressure from building up so massively that payment networks or politicians even have a leg to stand on.
It's one thing to have occasional issues with stuff slipping through the cracks, that happens. But it's a completely different thing to just not do anything for years. In the case of Steam, let's just take the recent Nazi scandal [1] - reports of users using blatant Nazi imagery and vocabulary date back almost a decade [2] and that's the oldest thing I could find in a minute of Googling, I 'member this being a thing even years before Trump's first presidency but honestly I can't be bothered to search for more old Nazi shit at 9 o'clock in the morning.
Had Steam done something about the Nazis back in 2017, I guarantee you that 2024 Bloomberg piece wouldn't ever have come into existence. That's seven years in which Steam did nothing to combat users using swastikas - stuff that could trivially be caught using machine learning, even back in the time.
> Applying moderation and reacting to legitimate complaints in time would have prevented pressure from building up so massively that payment networks or politicians even have a leg to stand on.
How would moderation help when the games that are being removed from the platforms are perfectly legal, and in compliance with the terms the platforms out on the creators?
The only problem with the games is that a highly influential group of people views them as immoral, and use them as a stepping stone towards achieving their broader goal of censoring all adult content.
The nazi thing may have brought a little bit more attention to Steam but I really can't imagine it was a big decisive factor instead of Steam's allowing of porn games and displaying them on the best selling lists with the adult options enabled
It's that "they should have done something" is an anecdote-based complaint that ignores everything they actually do.
If some service takes reasonable measures and solves the large majority of the problem, there will still be some instances that they miss and then critics will point to them and claim they're not doing enough. If they take more aggressive measures that aren't worth the candle, there will still be some instances that they miss and then critics will point to them and claim they're not doing enough.
It's "meet the impossible standard of having no bad things ever happen or you're not doing enough and we have to pass these bad laws".
> there will still be some instances that they miss
We're talking about hundreds if not thousands of complaints here for Pornhub, that went ignored for years.
We're talking about highest level politicians in the EU raising serious stink first, then threatening regulation and only then following through with it in Meta's case.
Only here we are talking about steam/itch.io, not pornhub. What is the point of putting them together? Steam/itch.io did not have to deal with the same issues of actual (as in involving real persons) sexual abuse/sex trafficking that pornhub faced but ignored.
