Gaming companies are sharing gamers’ user information with the government to root out so-called domestic violent extremists.

Billionaire Socialist azan coming to the defence of gamers.

“All I can think of is the awful track record of the FBI when it comes to identifying extremism,” Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer who often streams while playing video games under the handle HasanAbi, says of the mechanisms. “They’re much better at finding vulnerable teenagers with mental disabilities to take advantage of.”

  • GinAndJuche@hexbear.netMEnglish
    19·
    4 months ago

    The thread on pcgamer linking this has tons of people talking about Snowden and rejecting the “China bad” narrative to talk about stuff like “I’m so glad they are banning TikTok to avoid the youth learning this stuff” and “boy oh boy, I’m so happy my own government is putting me lists and they only care about TikTok”.

    Place is usually reactionary as fuck

    • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      11·
      4 months ago

      I saw that too. This particular comment made me chuckle:

      "Not surprised to see this dumb subreddit on this dumpster fire of a website supporting this, because they think its going to take out their personal political enemies.

      Truly a pro gamer moment."

      Pleasant surprise.

  • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    17·
    4 months ago

    They targeted gamers.

    Gamers.

    We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.

    We’ll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it’s fun.

    We’ll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.

    Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.

    Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?

    These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We’re already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren’t shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, r— apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that’s already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they’ve threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can’t is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.

    Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You’re not special, you’re not original, you’re not the first; this is just another boss fight.

    • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      30·
      4 months ago

      Fighting things that a lot of “normal” people don’t like is always the cover. Whether that’s fighting racists, mass shooters, pedophiles, drug dealers, thieves, etc.

      The subtext is always that 90% of it is to go after enemies of the ruling class i.e. left-wing activists who are doing effective action out in the world.

      You can see how vague their use of “domestic exremists” is. And of course they never show their work and provide statistics on their monitoring activity.

      The article has a section here detailing it:

      since 2019 the U.S. government has employed five domestic terrorism threat categories. These are defined by the FBI and DHS as racial/ethnically motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority violent extremism, animal rights or environmental violent extremism, abortion-related violent extremism, and all other domestic terror threats.

      1. Ambiguous whether they’re targeting ethnic minorities for hating whites/“Americans” vs. white spremacists (it’s the former).
      2. Ambiguous whether it’s left-wing activists or just sovereign citizen types (it’s the former)
      3. left-wing activists
      4. Ambiguous whether it’s pro-abortion activists or the people literally attacking abortion clinics (it’s the former, even though the latter is implied)
      5. “all other domestic terror threats” (left-wing activists not covered under the former definitions)

      Always gotta assume the worst.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      12·
      4 months ago

      Yes, ideally it’s good. But historically, the FBI and other law enforcement crack down on leftists and progressive liberals to the point of slander and murder.

      The right wing extremists are often just arrested or simply used as assets to destroy the left. Communism is explicitly prohibited under law. Right wing extremism is not mentioned, so they get to weasel their way out of vague “extremism” charges

      And other times, they keep grooming the fascists or provide material support because they support this shit or too incompetent to control their monsters.