Valve's Free Speech Bonanza

In contrast to Facebook’s Dilemma, I would like to point out a well established corporation going in the complete opposite direction: Valve.

They struggled for years on how to properly police their storefront. They tried to ban "pornography" but then someone noticed that gay sexual content was far more likely to be banned than anything else. Robert Yang's games (e.g. a dick pick simulator, a gay dating sim at urinals, etc) was routinely banned from the platform. Meanwhile, mainstream games routinely skirted the outlines of the policy without any ill effect, while indie games (especially Anime Visual Novels) routinely got banned for innocuous content. No one really understood what the policy meant and it was obvious it wasn't enforced uniformly. So after some soul searching, Valve officially said they were going to take a hands off approach:

So we ended up going back to one of the principles in the forefront of our minds when we started Steam, and more recently as we worked on Steam Direct to open up the Store to many more developers: Valve shouldn't be the ones deciding this. If you're a player, we shouldn't be choosing for you what content you can or can't buy. If you're a developer, we shouldn't be choosing what content you're allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make. Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.

With that principle in mind, we've decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling.

And by any measure, they seem to have stuck to their guns on this matter. Granted, they have an intricate web of user-submitted tags which allows precise navigation for anyone who wants to avoid certain topics. But the goal of allowing people to furnish their own content policy seems to work. When I browse Steam, I am not bombarded by the latest waifu intercourse simulation (but they exist for sure) and people stick to their walled gardens for the most part.

Granted, games journalists seemed to totally hate this policy but I have no idea what their better idea is. Steam left open this ambiguous clause about "straight up trolling" which seems to narrowly apply only to games which intentionally try to test the waters. The most recent game that fell to this rule was "Rape Day".

Essentially, Valve allows anything on its platform unless it's illegal (which in the US context I think only really applies to child pornography). Facebook already has a baseline of illegality but they supplant it with a tangled web of additional content policies. A handful of games not making the cut seems to be an acceptable cost for the plethora of options available on a widely used and robust digital platform.