this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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It Turns Out, Steam’s Adult Content Ban Has Been Plotted For A Year And Is Spearheaded By One Of Project 2025’s Leading Voices

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[–] Bloobish@hexbear.net 57 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Honestly hoping this punches right into the gaming rightwing media sphere and leads to it having a meltdown. Would be funny if it was the treats being taken by overzealous christofascists that implodes the internet video game alt right media sphere.

[–] mrfugu@hexbear.net 50 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Possible but doesn’t seem likely. Even ‘Collective Shout’ is a highly conservative group yet the chud sentiment seems to be “how dare these feminists”

[–] Bloobish@hexbear.net 32 points 3 weeks ago

So more or less they're blaming feminists for censoring games even though it's evangelical Christians, man the narrative really got flipped post 2010s...

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[–] MohammedTheCommunistPalestinian@hexbear.net 30 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

gaming rightwing media sphere

why is it so big

Gaming wasn't as politicized before gamergate

[–] corvidenjoyer@hexbear.net 34 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

There's book that goes into this. Here is the author talking about it. https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-bannon-white-gamers-seinfeld-joshua-green-donald-trump-devils-bargain-sarah-palin-world-warcraft-gamergate-2017-7

Transcript

Bannon is a fascinating character. He kind of came out of nowhere. He’s from a Navy family in Richmond, Virginia. He served in the Navy. He kind of basically talked his way into Harvard Business School and a job at Goldman Sachs."

After Goldman Sachs, he started his own boutique investment bank Bannon & Company and he was trying to broker a sale of Castle Rock Entertainment, which owned the rights to “Seinfeld.” He was trying to broker a sale between Westinghouse and Ted Turner and when Turner got the table, it turned out he was a little short of cash and rather than let the deal fall apart, Bannon and his partners agreed to take residuals in five television shows, including “Seinfeld,” in exchange for their cash fee. At the time, “Seinfeld” was like in its second or third season, wasn’t a big deal, Bannon thought it was going to be the runt of the litter. As we all know, it became a hit and he has since made about $2.5 dollars.

Bannon had actually spent about a year in the mid-2000s in Hong Kong as the CEO of this bizarre video game company. The company didn’t actually make video games, what it did was try to profit from something called gold-mining, where you have players go in to these games, win gold and special armor and prizes, and then go sell it to gamers in the real world so they can kind of cheat and skip ahead a couple of levels.

This was a serious business, it was actually backed by Goldman Sachs, but it crashed and went bankrupt because the gamers themselves who weren’t cheating became enraged basically that these other people were doing, they put so much pressure on the gaming companies. The gamers organized themselves on these “World of Warcraft” message boards. They put so much pressure on the video game companies, that they decided to basically ban gold-farming, which killed Bannon’s business, but it awakened him to the power of what he called “rootless white males” who spend all their time online. And five years later when Bannon wound up at Breitbart, he resolved to try and attract those people over to Breitbart because he thought they could be radicalized in a kind of populist, nationalist way. And the way that Bannon did that, the bridge between the angry abusive gamers and Breitbart and Pepe was Milo Yiannopoulous, who Bannon discovered and hired to be Breitbart’s tech editor.

[–] Bloobish@hexbear.net 20 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Mainly due to grifters being paid very well for spreading bullshit misinformation and blaming everything on "the woke" via both the algorithm and that angry young men love feeding into that sphere.

[–] MohammedTheCommunistPalestinian@hexbear.net 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

the woke when gamergate happened no one used that word ,only the word politically correct existed

[–] sleeplessone@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I recall the term "social justice warrior" (SJW) being in vogue at the time.

no that came after it

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[–] ghosts@hexbear.net 46 points 3 weeks ago

2026 Bingo Card: Disco Elysium banned for promoting "pornography" (LGBTQ+ themes)

[–] Carcharodonna@hexbear.net 41 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Bill Ackman has also been involved in putting pressure on payment processors regarding “adult content”: https://www.ft.com/content/cff23e36-b507-4717-8830-8b06741c8fd5

There really needs to be more research/info on why this is happening.

[–] Monk3brain3@hexbear.net 33 points 3 weeks ago

Seems like all the worst people are involved. It's more or less an attack on freedom of speech.

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[–] egg1918@hexbear.net 38 points 3 weeks ago
[–] LaBellaLotta@hexbear.net 27 points 3 weeks ago

I guess the gamers really were being oppressed?

[–] Soot@hexbear.net 17 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

downbear To be honest, this article is a nothingburger and the title of the post is an outright falsehood. They themselves even seem to have changed the article title to a nothing statement.

Article basically just says "You know how Steam removed some adult content? Well in the big Project 2025 text it also talks about restricting pornography!". There's no links, no plot, no spearheading, nothing.

So apart from saying "Yes, Project 2025 is full of bad things", there's nothing else to be said here.

[–] ghosts@hexbear.net 16 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I been hacked. All my waifus gone. This just sold please help me.

all-my-apes-gone

[–] Monk3brain3@hexbear.net 15 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

The most right wing demographic losing their treats due to their own bigotry is kind of a funny prospect. This is definitely a "let them fight" scenario

[–] Azarova@hexbear.net 79 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

This is definitely a "let them fight" scenario

No it isn't. These are the first steps towards declaring queer existence to be pornographic, and then banning queer content from every platform entirely. I'm sorry if this comes off as harsh, but I am so fucking tired of seeing this take from people who should know better. Please think a few more steps ahead as to what this actually means and what their real goals are. Reactionaries consistently wield payment processors like a club to deplatform anything they don't like. They've been doing this for basically decades at this point. To see hexbears going "haha silly gamers losing their titty slop games" without a single thought as to why this is happening or considering that this may just be the opening moves towards a larger goal, has been fucking maddening.

Editing to add some context: The Christofascists behind this have always seemed queer existence to be inherently sexual. Just take a look at their rhetoric surrounding the litany of book bans that have happened throughout US schools. This is just another prong in their """save the children""" (read: erase queer people from public existence) crusade.

[–] CthulhusIntern@hexbear.net 42 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Also, in a lot of ways, the war on porn is even worse than the war on drugs, since drugs have an actual medical definition, whereas no one can agree on what porn is. The most famous definition is "you know it when you see it".

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 24 points 3 weeks ago

every Sears catalog with underwear models is porn

[–] lilypad@hexbear.net 64 points 3 weeks ago (18 children)

I mean, this affects queer people too. Like, our existence is deemed sexual and adult... and soon illegal too it feels like.

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[–] SuperNovaCouchGuy2@hexbear.net 54 points 3 weeks ago

There is nothing wrong with pornographic video games as a concept and everyone watches porn, not only right wingers. This is censorship by one of the most detestable abrahamic offshoots, western bourgeois christianity, because they are fucked up deluded nutcases who worship the Demiurge and want everyone to suffer, pushing greater bourgeois censorship and state surveillance as a preventative measure for any left populist action (steam censorship is part of a larger plan to clamp down on the internet more being carried out across all western governments).

[–] imogen_underscore@hexbear.net 54 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

no it isn't. we need some kind of big post disabusing people of this vulgar and poorly thought out take

[–] Abracadaniel@hexbear.net 23 points 3 weeks ago

I'm not really equipped to write one about this issue wrt video games but I might do so regarding what I see as parallel patterns, i.e. sex negativity (in media) and disdain for atheism.

some of y'all don't remember the Bush era and it shows.

[–] Monk3brain3@hexbear.net 5 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

I would love to learn tbh. I just figured that the right wingers going after gaming would mainly affect gamers, who are the just right wing losers

[–] corvidenjoyer@hexbear.net 34 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I would love to learn tbh. I just figured that the right wingers going after gaming would mainly affect gamers, who are the just right wing losers

I have to wonder what you even think video games are with this kind of take.

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[–] miz@hexbear.net 16 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

there are people who are gamers in that they occasionally enjoy a video game, and then there people who identify as gamers

[–] DerEwigeAtheist@hexbear.net 45 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Moralist nonsense

Imagine finding censorship by anglo cristofashists(on a global scale no less) good, cause the thing they are banning is something you personally don't like.

[–] Monk3brain3@hexbear.net 5 points 3 weeks ago

Oh I don't think it's good. But gamers are going to be eating shit. And that's still funny

[–] carpoftruth@hexbear.net 16 points 3 weeks ago

i too enjoy celebrating censorship campaigns driven by theocratic fascists because of the potential to make my perceived enemies in the culture wars sad. surely this won't be directed towards left-wing causes

[–] egg1918@hexbear.net 11 points 3 weeks ago

How long do you think it will take for pro Palestine content online to be flagged as adult and thus censored? It's not a matter of if but when

[–] altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 3 weeks ago

They won't fight because major studios would be affected last and only after a couple of rounds of racket. Games with sexual content were easy targets and those you can hardly milk. Those already problematic like Activision with CoD, well-beloved by the type of gamers you probably dislike most, would happily do an LLM Donald cameo if it means funding or easing taxes.

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