How “nazi glorification” became one of <em>Garry’s Mod</em>’s few prohibited acts

Creator says being a parent has made his moderation attitudes "less black and white."

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[DovePig]

When people make good decisions, and change their mind about something because they've matured, we should applaud them for it, not ask what took so long.

I'd rather be an ally and welcome someone than shame them.

You're right, I stand corrected. I do indeed appreciate they made this decision now, even if I would have welcomed it earlier myself (coming from Europe, I might have had a somewhat different stance on Nazi propaganda, even if we have a lot of them here as well). It's still a pretty good decision, obviously, and kudos to them for that!

 

[DovePig]

Mate, do you honestly believe that people should have been able to predict the rise of neo-Nazism nearly two decades out? Because that's an Olympic-sized leap of logic. It's easy now to look back and say "well gee, maybe we should have put more explicitly anti-fascist policies in place back in the day", but back in 2006 the idea that Nazis were bad was pretty damn universal to the point that we didn't need to explicitly codify it in writing.

Of course, now this has roused my interest in getting back into GMod. I haven't touched it in several years, but I do recall having some fun with TTT and the WarioWare gamemodes.

Predict the rise of it? Probably. I remember plenty of really violent neo‑Nazi demos back around the 2000s here in Europe. Their scene was actually more violent and prevalent than today, even if somewhat smaller (before it merged with all the conspiracy theorists, anti‑vaxxers, incels and all the others like pro‑Russian Nazis*).

That said, my initial comment you reacted to was perhaps needlessly snarky and in hindsight not really helpful, as nobody much imagined the ways these groups would radicalise online as such – it was pretty much all offline through concerts or demos back then.

*: Russia always had the highest amount of neo‑Nazis among the European countries, up to them doing actual pogroms of Central Asian migrant workers, them being targeted and killed, with the authorities usually turning a blind eye. They even ran bootcamps for European neo‑Nazis.

 

[DovePig]

uhhmmmm.... Sorry. No.
They've been lurking in the shadows for a very, very long time, LONG before the 2000's, using Usenet, dial-up BBS, AOL, Compuserve, and IRC, long before HTML became a thing. Especially Usenet and IRC. It freaking exploded on that scene. It was not very long at all that Arpanet went live after the end of WW2, after all. They've been connecting with each other in myriad clandestine ways since.

Some were even using C and Ku band gear as well as HAM gear (like slow-scan fax) to stay in touch with each other, and tracking down those various forms of backchannel communication was how we found a great many of the Nazi's that went in hiding.

While certainly true, depending on the locale (and local antifascist activists even infiltrated some of their networks even back then, publishing some compromising photos they shared with each other, resulting in a few neo‑Nazi convictions), it was still a bit before facebook, youtube, roblox and all that making online radicalisation so much easier. FFS, most neo‑Nazi bands still sold physical CDs at "hidden" concerts for profit, back in these days...