Steam, Discord, Twitch, Reddit to Testify Before Congress Over 'radicalization'
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CensorshipOnline RadicalizationFree Speech
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Online Radicalization
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The CEOs of Steam, Discord, Twitch, and Reddit have been invited to testify before Congress over concerns of 'radicalization' on their platforms, sparking debate over censorship and free speech.
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For Context: They plan legislation to censor content creators critical of the regime or Israel, some of those content creators have larger audiences than legacy media (with younger people). Its a bi-partisan issue [1], so likely something is gonna happen and its not looking good.
[1] For instance Ritchie Torres (democrat) called for the ban of hasan due to his pro-Palestine politics: https://ritchietorres.house.gov/congressman-ritchie-torres-w...
Perhaps DHS should pull the agents back that they sent over to ICE so that they can go back to working on domestic terrorism again. Sound like a major fuck up on the administration's part.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/17/justice-depa...
It would seem we're too late to outweigh the impact of AIPAC...
With Discord they really need to understand the difference between server level and platform level. A non-private tweet or Reddit post can be casually seen or shared by anyone on the platform, or even not on the platform. But I've been on Discord for a long time and I've never seen this extremism because I haven't gone out of my way to join servers where it's the culture.
I’ve never been in a private subreddit, and the only public Discords I’ve been in are corporately managed with “community managers” and stuff.
On Reddit, the upvote and suggestion system amplifies the echo chamber, people are having an entire conversation on one topic. In Discord people usually don't read more than a few existing messages unless they're specifically looking for something, it's far more unorganised and transient.
Discord is different because you have to intentionally join a leftist or conservative chat channel and the content is not suggestive.
Don't we all remember how worked up we were over the russia collusion story, and the special prosecutor Robert muller...and nothing came of it...and we all forgot about it.
I genuinely feel that the constant exposure to a media that fights for your outrage is the single most dividing factor in our country. It's not a president, its not a Charlie Kirk, its not a Nancy Pelosi. Its a news channel that blasts the worst extreme of an interpretation of a quote into a dedicated story, day in and day out.
We no longer have conversations, in person or online, that don't include a whatsaboutism for every single thing.
What about Charlie kirks assassin, what about the January riots, what about blm riots, what about trumps assassination attempts, what about Nancy Pelosis husband, what about ....
Question the media you consume. Really consider the quality of information you're digesting or if its just a play for an emotional reaction.
There was a full report and people were convicted of crimes related to the investigation.
Why did you say nothing became of it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report
Trump has a massive number of followers and constantly posts inflammatory comments on the current political situation.
It's just free association untethered from the costs of physically finding your associates. During the 2020 BLM protests I found myself in a large Telegram groupchat of protest organizers. The organizers could have done the same thing in a person's house or a community center but it's cheaper and easier to do this in a groupchat.
I don't know what anyone can do about it without breaking US Constitutional freedoms or the SCOTUS narrowing the freedoms when applied to digital media (which I think would be a dangerous precedent.) It seems like the physical constraints of association used to have a pretty big hand in shaping 'radical' culture in the past.
These echo chambers can easily motivate people into violence who otherwise wouldn't. The cheapness and ease of forming mass groups to organize such events is also a huge problem. If it weren't so easy to build a group online and you had to do it in person, how many fewer of these groups would form?
How good or bad it is kind of depends on your perspective. For the current government, activists planning protests and organizing to push for government reform or equality or whatever issue, this is an extremely bad and dangerous thing. For a plurality of citizens it's an extremely good and necessary thing. The same applies to hate groups planning mass shootings or whatever. They think it's just and necessary work and some parts of our government would be thrilled to encourage it.
Either way, the current authoritarian regime has a vested interest in shutting down this and other types of free expression and speech and association. Whether that's good or bad remains to be seen. Turns out that human psychology and society are quite complicated and messy.
Control of speech is the One Ring, that governments are always tempted towards, always rationalizing it as the solution to all of their problems, and under no circumstances should be allowed to possess. Of course it is bad in an authoritarian regime! Messy and complicated does not override the overwhelming evidence, it does not in fact remain to be seen.
Well that's the thing, these apps can ban whoever they want they're not run by the government. The government cannot force them by law but I'm sure they can be very persuasive, especially given how many bootlickers execs there are
See the recent tweet of trump declaring antifa as a terrorist organization, it's not even an organization to begin with.
Contempt of congress is like a 3 month sentence some 2-3 years into the future. Who knows who the CEO is gonna be by then and if it's still the same person it could be seen as an opportuinity to pass the baton or put a temporary CEO in place instead.
Even the CEOs themselves could think about it, 3 months sentence in 2027 maybe better than 3 hours grilling sitting there having to take it without any chance to answer back when attacked