Steam Now Allows Filtering of Slurs & Swearing

Valve is adding a profanity and slur filter to Steam’s chat system, where people can add their own block lists. It is customizable and people can remove specific words.

The feature is now available through the Steam Lab beta program. The video game company has plans to make it a universal option soon.

It is used to filter a default list of commonly used strong profanity. That includes slurs for racial, religious, ethnic, and other identifying groups. Moreover, users can choose to add or remove specific words or upload full block lists of terms.

Steam has already been censoring offensive language across its public platform. That includes in-forum posts and reviews. It has implemented an optional profanity filter for specific games, such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Destiny 2. 

The new feature works across Steam’s chat service and supported games. Its block lists have more options than simply enabling or disabling the filter.

New Filter Only Lets a User Avoid Seeing Profanity & Slurs

Steam’s new feature doesn’t actually block profanity or slurs. It just lets individual users personally avoid seeing them. So, they appear normal to people without the filter.

Valve wrote that they don’t want to censor users in chat, but rather, empower them to choose from what they see. That’s consistent with the company’s overall approach to moderating Steam.

It accepts a wide range of games on its storefront, for example. However, on the other hand, it urges people to filter their recommendations while shopping.

It may also add the feature to more forms of user-generated content in the future. Moreover, it is leaning on users to help organically improve its system by uploading their own filter lists. 

This can help catch the endlessly evolving terms that trolls use to get around those filters. Apparently, the current list was built from a large sample of in-game chats.

According to Steam, it can remove around 75 percent of offensive language. That is done by filtering variants of the top 5 most commonly used strongly profane or hateful words.

The number of variations is extremely high. Over 56% of the profanity and slurs in its sample were variants of “f***” (presumably “fuck”). Another 10% were variants of “s***” (presumably “shit”).

Steam’s Strategy Hasn’t Always Worked

Valve argues that an outright banning of words like slurs would cause collateral damage. It says marginalized groups have reclaimed words that are considered offensive in most contexts. 

So, if someone is verbally abusing you in a multi-person chat, other people may still see what they’re saying.

However, this strategy of letting users pick what they see hasn’t always worked. We could take discussion boards, for instance. Developers expressed frustration over a lack of moderation, eventually prompting Valve to take a more hands-on approach. 

Valve says that the team can receive feedback on how well they work, since its language filters are in beta.

The company’s announcement says that the purpose of this experiment is to understand whether the tools they provide successfully empower users. With it, they want them to be able to control the chat content they experience on Steam.