Sometimes, journalism means asking your friends to curse you out. (Thomas Wilde Photo)

You may have missed it, as this has been an unusually crazy news cycle even for this year, but Valve announced on Tuesday evening that its online storefront Steam now offers a Chat Filtering feature. The software has been in beta since August, and was initially built by Valve for popular multiplayer games such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It allows users to “customize the language they see from others on the platform” in all games that support the feature.

With Chat Filtering enabled, Steam users will see “commonly used strong profanity and slurs” as heart symbols or asterisks instead of words. This is on by default when chatting with people who aren’t on your friends list, and off by default for people who are. You also have access to a custom filtered list, which updates your personal experience instantly, and shares the data with Steam to improve its filtering ability.

I have conducted extensive testing on this feature in its current state, by getting my Steam friends list to swear at me for about an hour, which was harder than I thought it would be. The chat filter simply wipes out the entire word in which a tracked profane term is present. The filter is heavily weighted towards permutations of the F-bomb, but less common terms of profanity can sometimes skate by as part of a larger word, i.e. the infamous “Scunthorpe problem.”

In Valve’s original announcement, the term “supporting games” is carrying a lot of mail. While the feature may be complete and available, it doesn’t seem that it’s universally applied on a client level, and no list of games that explicitly support Chat Filtering seems to be available at time of writing.

That does raise the question of why this abruptly became a priority for Valve. For almost the entirety of Steam’s existence as a platform, many of its most popular games, including Valve’s own Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike, have had at least some significant multiplayer component, and as anyone who’s ever played more than an hour of any online game can attest, the communities that spring up around them are often among the most toxic places on the Internet. By rights, one would’ve expected Steam to have gotten a chat filter years ago.

The new options for Chat Filtering can be found in Steam under Settings -> In-Game. (Thomas Wilde Photo)

It does make sense in the context of current events, however. There’s been a lot of talk this summer about the usage of unfiltered online spaces as tools for radicalization, particularly in the context of the QAnon conspiracy theory. As far back as 2011, there have been scattered reports of fringe groups and even terrorist organizations using in-game chat applications to spread their ideology. There was a particularly infamous case last year, reported on by Vice, regarding a white-nationalist group that formed a guild in World of Warcraft.

Valve’s debut of the Chat Filtering system came out right at the close of business on the West Coast on Tuesday, a little over an hour after Facebook announced that it would ban all groups and communities on its service that supported and spread QAnon.

While Chat Filtering had been in beta in Steam Labs for over a month at the time, the sudden debut does seem to suggest that Valve is trying to cover its bases in a time when any totally unmoderated space, such as the peer-to-peer chat in a multiplayer computer game, might end up being an attack vector for radicalization. While many of its users don’t take advantage of it, it’s worth noting that Steam is as much of a social network as a digital storefront, which renders it vulnerable to this sort of exploitation. The writing appears to be on the wall.

Valve launched Steam as a software client for product updates in September 2003. It was eventually expanded into a full-fledged online storefront for digital game sales on PC. While Valve is typically quiet about its user base, independent tracking sources such as SteamDB indicate that around 15 million players use Steam to play and purchase PC games on a regular basis. It reached a new all-time peak of 24.5 million concurrent users in April, breaking the previous record that had been set not even three weeks beforehand.

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