Heads up somewhat long thread

No we are not asking for them to be wholesale removed

So as you may have seen there has been a few threads already on this topic. I want to help put down a more in depth reason why these should be dealt with, both for reasons under Steam TOS, readability, and for legality reasons.


Most of you know about the item known as the "Conscientious objector" within the game, and its ability to show pictures in a similar fashion as sprays where able to, just in a mobile form.

Sprays themselves caused problems themselves, and as such where disabled in official servers, and eventually having valve wipe the cache for them each match from the amount of bots that would sometimes load into the game holding CP inside their spray cache.

Down below I shall list down a few reasons that Objectors should be handled better than the current:

*Objectors can show obscene material that was not part of the games original game rating, yes it may be rated as M for mature, but their are different types of content even within that rating that can cause it to be so, such as strong language, intense violence, blood and gore, and sexual content. With TF2 being rated M for blood/gore and violence not the other few.

*Content on the objectors can possibly get streamers of the game taken down for images that they had no intention of showing.

*Of the obscene material that can be shown, it's usually one of these two (but not limited)
1: Hate symbols (Swastika,etc)
2: Pornography (often anime CP mostly known as Loli)

For anyone trying to make the argument of Loli being legal, according to US law (yes I know that doesnt cover all countries, but most except germany are covered similar or more extensive)

https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/April/03_ag_266.htm
US protect act which illegalities depictions of children, even computer simulated.


https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmo/pr/project-safe-childhood-24
A court case of found guilty of obscenities for possesion.


The last two are very important since they portray the large problem with the objectors, with such content being illegal in most countries. Valve being a multinational platform, must follow these rulings to stay active in said areas, and as such it is against Valve TOS, the link provided here.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6862-8119-C23E-EA7B

Within the TOS under content it states the following:

*Porn, inappropriate or offensive content, warez or leaked content or anything else not safe for work.

Many objectors fall into this.

*Racism, discrimination

Once again a main problem of objectors that violates steam TOS, it also would be to prevent racist or discriminatory item names or descriptions.

While this does not represent all objectors as a whole, it does represent a rather large portion of them. As such I put forward, a suggestion from this thread.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/440/discussions/0/3458220484815497986/

Originally posted by Marukuso:

Tbh you could probably fix this by making it so you can only use pictures that are present in your steam profile's artwork tab and are public, valve employees actually do something about those if i'm not mistaken and you can report them directly, would cause some issues with applying colored decals i guess.

I propose this as an easier suggestion, both economically for Valve, and as an easier way to moderate the images that would be posted on said objectors. Valve has been more active when dealing with community artwork, and having it be linked would prevent the awkward slow process that happens when they would be reported manually.

At the current time for item names, the current suggestion is for there to be a report in game that will work similar to a profile report for an item, it wont speed up the moderation on it, but will make it much easier for users to report. However any other ideas are still welcome.

These problems desperately need to be addressed because they honestly are a massive problem waiting to happen. If anyone remembers the news coverage that happened with the bots, imagine what they would react about if they knew about the number of objectors that happen to display illegal content. While the bots would hold it in there cache from time to time, and spam links (probably for viruses for those links) and that was enough to catch their attention.


If you have any other reasons to add to the list or related subjects or suggestions comment it below and I will try to add it if I can.