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Use two different moderation tracks: run the discussion hub firmly against harassment, threats, doxing, discrimination and coordinated disruption, while treating ordinary political criticism of the game as allowed feedback. Hub moderators can pin, merge, lock, warn, delete clearly abusive posts and ban accounts from the hub. Developers cannot delete reviews; they can flag abusive or off-topic reviews and ask Steam Partner Support to investigate an anomalous review wave.
The safest operating rule is to moderate conduct, not viewpoint. Publish a clear house rule, keep Valve’s default reported-posts queue unless you have reliable staff, avoid arguing with reviewers, and document a brigade for Valve rather than trying to fight it with mass reports.
What is the difference between political criticism, harassment and brigading?
Political disagreement about a game can be legitimate criticism. Harassment is person-directed abuse or intimidation. Brigading is coordinated activity intended to flood a hub or manipulate its review signal. They may appear together, but each requires a different response.
| Pattern | Typical examples | Primary response |
|---|---|---|
| On-topic political criticism | Complaints about a character, pride flag, studio statement, patch, pricing or the experience of being part of the game community. | Leave it up if it remains civil and relevant. Correct factual errors once, then improve the product or provide a concise official explanation. |
| Political harassment | Slurs, deadnaming, threats, wishes of harm, doxing, stalking, public accusations about a developer’s private life, or attacks on protected groups. | Remove the abusive material, warn or temporarily ban the account, and flag a matching review as Abusive. |
| Brigading or a curator campaign | A social post or curator list directs people to paste the same political complaint, create duplicate threads or leave reviews unrelated to the product. | Merge or lock discussion clones, sanction accounts that raid the hub, flag reviews narrowly, and open a Partner Support case with evidence. |
Do not call every negative political opinion a brigade. A large wave can still be genuine dissatisfaction with a release, a business practice or the community experience. The question is whether the content violates a rule or is unrelated and coordinated, not whether the developer dislikes the opinion.
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Which Steam rules apply to political harassment?
Steam’s Online Conduct policy prohibits harassment, including trolling, baiting, threats, spamming, intimidation, abusive language and insults. It also prohibits doxing and other personal-rights violations, and forbids artificially manipulating Steam reviews or other content. The platform-wide policy is the right reference when a campaign targets people or attempts to distort the review system.
The Steam Rules and Guidelines for Discussions, Reviews and UGC add hub-specific standards. Posts must not be abusive, disparaging or inflammatory, create an unwelcoming environment, threaten or encourage harm, discriminate, bypass filters, troll or bait arguments, or make public accusations. Hubs must remain constructive and on topic; spam and reposting closed or deleted material are examples of off-topic behavior.
Respectful arguments are expressly allowed. Steam says moderators may lock a thread that has left a constructive path or is causing frequent disrespect, and may delete specific prohibited or non-constructive content while preserving the rest of a conversation. Removals normally generate a notification and a Support appeal link.
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Does Steam ban political discussion?
Not as a blanket rule in the current retrieved Valve text. The live guidance focuses on respect, relevance and harassment rather than naming politics as a prohibited category. An archived March 2023 page mentioned political and other argument-prone threads, but that older wording should not be presented as the current Steam rule.
You can still make politics off-topic in your own hub. A studio may lock a political fight because it is unrelated to the game or because it repeatedly produces disrespect. Publish that choice before a raid, apply it consistently, and distinguish real-world political debate from civil discussion of the game’s story or design.
Who controls Steam discussions and who controls reviews?
Discussions are yours to operate; reviews are Valve’s to adjudicate. In the hub, authorized staff can pin, merge, lock and delete posts, issue warnings, and ban users from that hub. A hub ban is not a platform-wide Steam ban: it blocks new threads, replies and UGC uploads in that community.
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Developers cannot directly delete a customer review. From the review’s detail view, use the orange moderator controls to flag Abusive, Off-Topic or Violates Community Guidelines. Valve moderators or employees decide whether to remove or unflag it. A confirmed rule-breaking review is banned, disappears and stops contributing to the score. An off-topic review normally remains in the score but receives reduced visibility.
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Steam’s review guidance also treats business practices and the experience of being part of a game’s community as potentially valid review subjects. A review saying that a developer’s political statement changed the buyer’s view is not automatically removable. Flag it only when the text is actually abusive, unrelated to the product or community, commercial, deceptive or part of artificial manipulation.
How should a studio prepare before a raid?
Preparation turns an emotional pile-on into a repeatable moderation operation.
- Choose the Valve queue model. By default, reported discussion posts enter Valve’s moderation process. In Steamworks Community settings, a studio can opt out and take exclusive responsibility for the Reported Posts forum. Most small teams should leave the default enabled while still assigning an internal officer to monitor urgent cases.
- Write a short house-rules post. State that abuse, threats, doxing, discrimination, slurs and witch hunts are prohibited; explain whether real-world party politics, war and religion are off-topic; and say that game-lore and design criticism is welcome when civil. Pin the post and, if desired, lock its comments so the rule itself does not become a debate.
- Promote a small, trusted team. Give one to three people a written brief: remove threats and personal information, merge duplicate raid threads, lock non-constructive arguments, avoid deleting ordinary criticism, and never argue with a target. Point them to Valve’s Steamworks Community Moderation documentation.
- Create a staff-only communication identity. If a reply is necessary, use an anonymous developer account or the official developer identity rather than exposing an individual employee to a hostile thread. Keep the reply factual and short.
- Prepare escalation details. Know the Partner Support publishing-help route, preserve links and timestamps, and keep screenshots of representative posts and review text. Do not publish private information while collecting evidence.
- Tell users how to report. Point to the flag control on posts and reviews. Explicitly ask people not to mass-report content simply because they dislike it; coordinated reporting can itself look like manipulation.
When a partner permission grants community officer rights, review exactly who can access bans and group settings. Permissions can take up to one hour to apply, so do not wait until a raid is active to promote someone.
What should moderators do when a discussion raid starts?
Use the least destructive action that stops the conduct, escalating only when the account keeps violating the rules.
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- Pause public replies. Capture URLs, account names, timestamps and screenshots. A heated developer response often attracts more replies and makes a staff member the story.
- Remove immediate harm. Delete slurs, threats, doxing, phishing, filter-bypass attempts and other clearly prohibited material. Do not delete a civil post merely because it criticizes the studio’s politics.
- Lock the bait thread. Add a one-line reason before locking, such as: Locked: off-topic personal attacks; continue game discussion in the pinned megathread. An unexplained lock looks like viewpoint censorship, while a calm reason records that the action addressed conduct.
- Merge duplicates. Use a labelled megathread when volume is high, or merge copies into the oldest relevant discussion. This preserves useful context and prevents dozens of identical raid threads from dominating the hub.
- Use private process messages. For a first-time wrong-subforum post or a minor rules mistake, explain the process privately instead of issuing a public warning.
- Warn first-time offenders. Steam’s warning reasons are translated to the player’s Steam language; custom reasons are not. Select the closest standard reason and keep any added explanation neutral.
- Apply a temporary hub ban. Use it for obvious raid accounts, repeated personal attacks or continued posting after a warning. Include a short reason visible to the player.
- Escalate repeat behavior. If a player has already received temporary bans and continues, a permanent ban from the hub may be appropriate. Record the prior actions so another moderator can see the pattern.
- Resolve the queue item. Mark acted-on reports as resolved so the hidden Reported Posts forum remains usable.
Deleting every negative thread is counterproductive. Valve’s partner guidance says deletion should be reserved for highly offensive or malicious material, not for hiding criticism. Over-deletion shifts the conversation from the game to the moderators.
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How do you handle a Steam review brigade?
Review moderation is narrower because Valve controls the score and the final enforcement decision.
- Classify each review. Flag Abusive for threats, harassment, wishes of harm, slurs or abuse aimed at developers or players. Flag Off-Topic when the text has no meaningful connection to the game, its development, its value proposition or the community experience. Use Violates Community Guidelines for other review-rule breaches.
- Do not treat politics alone as off-topic. A review can discuss a studio statement or the community experience and still be valid feedback. A sentence such as “I will not buy this because of the developer’s political post” may be unhelpful, but it is not automatically a rules violation.
- File one evidence-based Partner Support case. Include the time window, links to curator or social posts that directed the activity, examples of copied language, and whether the reviews are unrelated to the product. Ask Valve to add moderators and assess whether the period qualifies as an off-topic review bomb.
- Use no more than one official reply when necessary. Correct a concrete factual error without sarcasm, threats or score arguments. Replies are labelled and can amplify the review, so silence is often safer.
- Watch both score windows. Store pages show 30-day and lifetime review results. Steam says that, while a game is Mixed or better (40% or above), reviews are not a factor in algorithmic visibility; below 40%, the Mostly Negative range makes featuring less likely.
Steam says reviews from accounts that purchased the game on Steam and played it count toward the score. People with playtime from a key, free weekend or Family Sharing may write reviews, but not all such reviews affect the percentage. A purchased-copy political campaign can therefore move the score unless Valve determines that the period is an off-topic anomaly.
Flagging Off-Topic does not by itself remove a review from the percentage. Valve must ban the review or exclude an anomalous period. Steam’s own guidance says bomb activity often settles after a few days and that Valve has not seen a correlation between review bombs and purchasing behavior, but that is not a promise about a particular event.
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Contact Support when volume, coordination or threats exceed what your moderators can safely handle, or when a sudden unrelated wave threatens to push the game below the 40% visibility threshold. Valve says it can add extra moderators to flag abuse and review the event. If it determines that an abnormal, off-topic period is a review bomb, Valve may remove that period from the overall score; the studio cannot toggle that exclusion itself.
Describe the event factually: what triggered it, how the traffic arrived, what percentage of reviews mention the game, which posts contain harassment, and which links show coordination. Separate a broken patch or unpopular feature from a campaign unrelated to the product. Support may clear a flag; if you disagree, use the Partner Support appeal route rather than asking users to repeatedly report the same review. Steam does not allow the same user to re-report uncleared content unless it has been edited.
How do you add Steam community moderators?
A user must follow the game and join its official hub before an administrator promotes them. In the hub, use the star next to the person’s name, then set permissions in the community permissions editor at steamcommunity.com/ogg/<APPID>/permissionsEdit. Community moderators appear with an orange name and silver star; officers use a gold name and gold star.
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Internal Steamworks users with partner permissions such as Edit App Metadata or Edit App Marketing Data receive officer-level community rights. Edit App Metadata also provides administrative access to the group profile, member list, bans and permissions. Economy or Workshop Support is needed to ban shared files. Explain the distinction to staff: a moderator’s hub ban does not ban the account from Steam, and officer rights may cover more content than discussion posts.
Valve sometimes promotes trusted users as global moderators. Their presence does not remove the need for a studio’s own house rules or escalation plan. Give every new moderator a checklist and a clear rule that personal political agreement is never a sanctioning criterion.
Should a studio ban politics, or allow it with limits?
There are two defensible models. Allow respectful, game-relevant political discussion and lock threads when they become personal or off-topic, or publish a bright-line house rule that real-world politics, war and religion are not discussion topics. The second model is easier to apply consistently but removes some legitimate conversation; the first preserves more criticism but requires faster moderation.
Supermassive’s Directive 8020 community guidelines illustrate the bright-line approach: zero tolerance for abuse, harassment, bullying and discrimination, plus a prohibition on conversations about war, politics and religion. Present that as one studio’s policy, not as Steam law. A lore-focused hub might instead say: Real-world party politics is off-topic; criticism of the game’s story and representation is welcome when civil; attacks on people are prohibited.
Whatever model you choose, pin it, lock comments on the rules post if needed, and repeat the same reason when closing raid threads. Consistency matters more than whether the rule is permissive or restrictive.
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Lock stops a thread while preserving its record and is appropriate for a non-constructive argument, a duplicate raid thread or a recurring off-topic fight. Delete removes material and should be reserved for severe abuse, threats, doxing, phishing and clear malicious or rule-breaking content. Ban restricts a user from the hub and should normally follow a warning or repeated misconduct, with temporary bans first.
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Do not use deletion to hide ordinary negative opinions. Do not permanently ban a player for a single civil political complaint. Conversely, do not leave threats or private information visible in the name of transparency; preserve evidence privately and remove the harmful post.
How should the developer communicate during and after the incident?
Valve’s partner guidance is blunt: do not argue with fans or publicly battle reviewers. A named employee can become the target, and an argumentative reply often keeps a negative review circulating. If a response is necessary, use an anonymous developer account, state the relevant fact once, link to the house rules and stop.
After the wave, keep lock reasons visible, retain an internal incident log, and review which accounts were new, which were long-time customers, and whether a patch, trailer or statement triggered the event. Consider a staffed external forum or Discord when the Steam hub cannot remain constructive; several studios pay their own moderators for that reason. Do not restore deleted slurs for “transparency,” and do not unban without a written appeal that accepts the rules.
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- Claiming Steam bans all politics. The current rules do not establish a blanket political ban. Enforce your published scope instead.
- Deleting every negative thread. This hides useful product feedback and makes moderation the new controversy.
- Mass-reporting in retaliation. Document coordination for Support; do not organize a counter-brigade.
- Promising that Off-Topic flags will restore the score. Only Valve’s later decision to ban reviews or exclude an anomalous period can change their score contribution.
- Arguing from a personal account. It exposes staff and can increase the volume of hostile replies.
- Using the wrong statistic. Valve’s EU Terrorist Content Online transparency figures, including 52 removal orders in 2025, concern terrorist-content orders, not political-harassment removals. Valve has not published a Steam-wide count of political-harassment takedowns.
Steam’s scale explains why response times vary: The Guardian reported almost 42 million concurrent players around January 2026, hundreds of thousands of support tickets per week and fewer than 400 people at Valve, while the volunteer moderation programme was retired in 2022. Those figures are context, not a reason to tolerate abuse; they are a reason to make your evidence and escalation request precise.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a Steam review discuss a developer’s business or political decisions?
Yes. Steam’s review guidance says the value proposition, business practices and experience of being part of a game’s community can be valid feedback. The review still cannot contain threats, personal abuse, commercial spam or artificial score manipulation.
What happens if Valve clears a review flag?
The review remains visible and the same user generally cannot submit the identical report again unless the author edits the text. Send a documented disagreement through Partner Support instead of directing users to repeat reports.
Can a hub ban remove a player from Steam entirely?
No. A hub ban applies to that game’s community: the account cannot create new discussions, reply or upload UGC there. It does not revoke the person’s Steam account or access to other communities.
Is moving conversation off Steam a policy requirement?
No. It is an operational choice when the hub cannot be staffed safely or constructively. Keep Steam for moderated announcements and product support, and explain where the staffed community can be found without using the move to evade Steam’s rules.
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