Video Game FAQ: Does Steam Delete Video Game Reviews?
Q: Does Valve delete Steam video game reviews?
A: Yes. But stringent requirements need to be met before a user review of a video game can be considered for deletion.
Q: Why does Valve delete Steam video game reviews?
A: Valve moderators will delete video game reviews by users if thereās clear evidence of abuse or manipulation. Evidence of abuse and manipulation can include using botted accounts to post, organized brigading, inappropriate or harassing language, and spam.
Reviews may also be deleted if thereās no proof that the user posting the review owns the game on Steam. However, this is a gray area, as Steam will typically keep reviews for a game if the user bought the game on a different platform.
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Q: Does Valve automate community management?
A: Yes. Valve automates some lower-tier community management tasks to help lighten the load on the moderation team. An automated system flags, withholds, or temporarily hides reviews and other content that is obviously inappropriate, abusive, or has clear evidence of originating from a disingenuous source.
Q: What happens when the system flags user reviews?
A: The content will either be withheld or temporarily hidden and put into a moderatorās queue for review. The human moderator will then decide on a course of action.
Q: Who makes up the moderation team?
A: There are two types of community moderators. Valve moderators, who are denoted by a rectangular Valve logo on their profile, are usually employees of third-party service providers like TaskUs and Keywords Studios, and not employed by Valve directly. They can moderate all community content on the platformāincluding game savesābut they canāt issue VAC bans. They do not have direct access to credit card information, but they can access all other account-related information.
The second type of moderator is employed by the developer or publisher of a video game itself. These moderators are much more limited in what content and user information they can view and moderate, and can only moderate content on their own gameās Community Hub or their Publisher Page. A video game developerās or publisherās community managers and social media team are often given these types of moderation permissions on Steam.
A third type of moderator, called ācommunity moderatorsā used to exist, but were discontinued. Like developer and publisher moderators, they were limited in what content and user information they could view and moderate. However, they were not limited to just a single game or publisherās Community Hub.
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Q: What third-party service provider does Valve use?
A: Third-party video game industry services that Valve has been known to use include TaskUs and Keywords Studios. Keywords Studios is particularly notable for providing additional QA services to Valve.
Q: What courses of action can a moderator choose from?
A: The course of action a moderator can choose from typically depends on the type of content thatās being moderated. The most common actions are to remove content, warn the user, ban the user temporarily, permanently ban the user, and Community Strike the user. Community Strikes are the most severe. A user with enough Community Strikes will have their access to all Steam services terminated.
Itās possible and common for these actions to be used in conjunction with one another.
Q: Why did Valve discontinue community moderators?
A: Community moderators were discontinued for a variety of reasons, but most notably for unreliability, corruption, and inappropriate behaviour toward other moderators. The combined behavior of two of the most notorious community moderators was a significant contributing factor behind the retirement of community moderators.
Q: Can developers or publishers opt-out of moderation?
A: Yes. Many developers and publishers chose to opt-out of Valve moderation, preferring to use their own community management or social media teams. This is usually done to bring a gameās Community Hub in line with the developer or publisherās social media strategy.
Q: Is it possible to weaponize moderation?
A: Yes. Historically, some developers would opt-out of moderation, delete content they didnāt want, and then blame Valve moderators for censoring or silencing users. Others would choose to keep Valveās global moderation and claim that nothing could be done about it. It was also common practice to directly message some members of the moderation team in an effort to target specific users or control the flow of a discussion.
Many attempts to weaponize moderation came from small, independent, and inexperienced developers as well as politically active members of the userbase.
Valve and the third-party service providers it employs for moderation have since taken steps to greatly mitigate the capability to abuse the moderation system.
Q: Are there any users who are āuntouchableā?
A: Yes. There is at least one account that is completely untouchable. Although the reason is unknown, speculation is that the account is a honeypot for serious crimes with a significant online component.